What emotions really are

Paul E. Griffiths
A terrific book, rich in clever, direct philosophical arguments and grounded in very good control of the general scientific and relevant empirical literature.

1. Introduction
Philosophy of emotions in the light of contemporary philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of biology and empirical research on emotions. Emotion and terms for particular emotions are psychological kind terms-aspects of folk psychology, and we can no more rest content with armchair theorising about these categories than we can for any other folk category (life, matter and so on). E.g. superlunary objects constituted an important category in Aristotelian science, and there really are such objects, but it is nevertheless an arbitrary collection of objects, one that can play no role in any useful explanatory scheme. The same may be true of the emotions. Hitherto the phil of emotions has been dominated by the notion that emotional phenomena are best understood in terms of the beliefs and desires of those who use emotion terms, for these constitute the phenomena themselves. He calls these (for there are a number of variants, dealt with in chapter 2) propositional attitude theories. The important thing about such theories is that they were concerned to combat the feeling theory of emotions, which held that emotions are introspective experiences characterized by a quality and intensity of sensation [such that] the idnetity of the emotion depends on this quality (2). PATists regarded the feeling theory as false and pernicious, in that it places emotions above rational criticism, compromising ethics and aesthetics. His view is that the PATists are right to oppose feeling theory, but wrong to believe that a PAT is the only alternative. Even newer approaches, like those concerned with the social construction of emotion, have sided with PAT.

He has two tacks against PAT: one says that all versions have substantive problems that they can make little progress against; the other, methodological, objection says that the sort of conceptual analysis it depends upon is untenable. Conceptual analysis can only tell us what the relevant speech community believes about an emotion, since it depends upon the analysis of the application conditions of the relevant term. He argues that this presupposes an account of the semantics of kind terms, to wit, that their meaning is given by the rules competent speakers use to apply those terms, and everyday beliefs about the referents of kind terms are true by definition (4). He argues from a basis in more recent phil of language, grounded in the work of Kripke and Putnam, and their causal theories of meaning.

Part one: Emotions

2.The poverty of conceptual analysis 2.1 Here he sets out to show a), that propositional attitude theories (of which there several different varieties) have failed to solve the problems they set out to deal with; 2) that even if PAT acconts succeed in their own terms, they would not explain most of what should be explained by a theory of emotion (21). PATs type emotions in terms of the propositional attitudes that are associated with them, and which are taken to be a necessary condition of them (fear and the belief that danger threatens, for example). According to Kenny (whom he sees as having been very influential in establishing the tradition) a physiological state that lacks an intentional object or fails to lead to the right sort of intentional behaviour cannot be an emotion. They are, in short, criterial for emotions. So, empirical psychology can tell us nothing about emotions, which are to be investigated by conceptual analysis: this reveals the logical structure linking mental contents and emotion terms. Kennys apriorism is grounded in a Wittgensteinian distinction between criteria and symptoms, with the former revealing the logic or grammar of a term and the latter, which are inessential to the term itself (although there may be many important or interesting empirical questions about them). He quotes Solomon saying that the biological basis of anger and the sensations it involves are important for certain sorts of measurement, but they are only contingently correlated with the emotion (23). Thus, if 2

someone does not believe they are in danger he/she cannot be said to be afraid, no matter what physiological events are taking place. Griffiths says that Kenny and his followers assume that a concept is entirely constituted by what is currently believed about its referent; such a view is unable to account for the conceptual changes that have marked the history of science, in which concepts have embodied a project of discovery focused on the referent of a concept with the aim of forging an epistemically useful reformulation of the concept and beliefs about its referent. 2.2 PATs waxed just as behaviourism was waning in psychology, which saw psychologists move from physiological approaches to emotion to those that stressed the role of cognition. He discusses various seminal papers and ideas through this section. Part of the difficulty attaches to the way cognitive is used: some psychs think of all neural activity as cognition, but others use it for something like our everyday notion of thoughts. The real debate, though, is about the role of sub-personal, sub-intentional processes in the generation of emotional states and responses versus the sorts of ratiocinative processes we use in formulating long-term plans: do we react with disgust because we think something is disgusting, or are the processes that lead to this thought (and thus to voluntary action) distinct from the processes which lead to the emotional response? (26). Zajoncs data suggest that people can have an emotional response to something they have no thoughts about in the everyday sense of thoughts. (27). 2.3 He turns to a discussion of Robert Solomons work in The Passions, in order to show how this paradigm (and influential) formulation displays the persistent problems that bedevil PATs: 1. Objectless emotions (depression, anxiety); 2. Reflex emotions (fear of earthworms co-existing with belief that they are harmless); 3. Unemotional evaluations (smokers believe smoking to be dangerous but continue to smoke without fear);

4. Judgements underdetermine emotions (believing a woman is beautiful may give rise to envy, sexual desire, pity or nothing in particular); 5. Emotional responses to imagination (emotions can be evoked in the presence of beliefs about the untruth of just the propositions that PATists analyse as necessary to the emotion [although, there are escapes for the PAT here]) 6. Physiological responses (4 classes: facial expressions, musculo-skeletal changes [such as flinching, expressive vocal changes and states of the autonomic nervous system] neglected. 2.4 He considers modications to PAT that acknowledge some of these objections and try to deflect them by adding desires. He critiques Joel Marks attempt to make this move (31-2). 2.5 He then turns to hybrid theories that bring together propositional attitudes and physiological responses and critiques them (33-5) before reiterating the broad general objection to the idea of defining emotions only in terms of things logically connected to them, so that each becomes identified with a cluster of descriptions that every competent speaker of a language knows. 2.6 Emotional thoughts discusses attempts to provide additional propositional attitudes to fill the gaps that beliefs and desires couldnt deal with. But these dont work either, mostly because of the contortions produced by trying to come up with a propositional attitude that can cope with the objections listed above. In the face of scientific evidence presented later about the modularity of the mind and so on, the resort to a new and mysterious propositional attitude is not a very attractive option. What is right about these moves is their recognition that emotions characteristically involve irruptive patterns of motivation that disrupt stable goals. 2.7 Here he seeks to show that a successful PATone which would yield analyses of emotion types that are extensionally adequate (capturing all and only the instances of each type)would still fail to produce a satisfactory theory of emotion. He offers four pages of close argument that suggest that the goals of the PAT program are in themselves deeply unsatisfying.

3. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion 3.1 This has its roots in Darwins The expression of the emotions in man and animals ([1872] 1965). Darwin held to a feeling theory of emotion, so saw his account as explaining why emotions are expressed in the way they are, but his latter-day followers read him as showing that human expressions of emotions are vestiges of responses in ancestral species that served functions that are no longer relevant, but which have acquired secondary functions in intraspecific communication. Modern theorists treat emotions as syndromesas containing many elements no one of which constitutes the essence of the emotion. On such an orientation, Darwin not only pioneered what Griffiths calls a powerful pattern of adaptive-historical explanation, but also presents a theory of the evolution of the emotions themselves. 3.2 The revival of interest in evolutionary approaches to emotions and emotional expression has confirmed and extended Darwins results. Here, Griffiths reviews this modern work, beginning with Izard and then discussing in some detail the work of Ekman and his collaborators: these results strongly suggest that for a certain range of emotions, similar facial behaviour is selected for the same emotion concept in visually isolated preliterate cultures (51). (He notes, though, that Japanese reactions in stress tests varied depending on whether subjects were alone or in the presence of an experimenter; in the second case, they quickly masked negative emotions with a polite smile.) He finds compelling Ekmans ideas about the evolutionary history of the (6 or 7) affect programs associated roughly with the emotions picked out by the English terms anger, fear, surprise, sadness, contempt, disgust, and joy. He ends the section with a discussion of Eibl-Eibesfeldts work on the acquisition of facial muscle patterns in the expresssion of emotions among infants born deaf and dumb. 3.3 This brings him to a key argument for his overall case: the confusion surrounding notions of innateness and universality. The experiments he ended with in the previous section are usually interpreted as indicating that certain facial expressions of emotions have evolutionary explanations. But

they are often also used to support the view that they are innate or part of a universal human nature. These sorts of discussions, he says, are hopelessly confused about the distinction between the input side and the output side. The former refers to the stimuli that cause an emotion; the output side is the response itself. The work of Ekman and co is entirely concerned with the output side, and shows that people of different cultures respond in similar ways to things that frighten or sadden them, but not that people of different cultures are frightened or saddened by the same things. So it is beside the point to suggest that because people of different cultures respond differently to the same stimulus then they have different emotional repertoires. So, the work hes reviewed only suggestvery stronglythat the output sides of affect programs have evolutionary explanations. This has 2 aspects: i) the possession of an evolved trait is explained by the process of inheritance (I have a trait because I am descended from ancestors who had it.) ii) the form of an evolved trait is explicable by reference to the historical process that produced it. There are two other sorts of explanation that might be brought to bear on such traits: developmental explanations and competing explanations. The first refers to the processes that give rise to the trait in the developing organism, and it is important to take these into account in searching for evolutionary explanations; in fact, though, developmental and evolutionary explanations are complementary. His second sort covers those explanations that would drive out evolutionary explanations; he cites Ellstrands spoof explanation of why juveniles are smaller and younger than their parents as an example of one that shows that a trait was to be expected as a consequences known to exist independently of those produced by evolution. Competing explanations are sometimes offered in response to evolutionary psyschologists explanations of, for example, common but irrational patterns of reasoning; a neuropsychologist might respond by suggesting that any computational method that solves the sort of problem in question will be prone to such errors (see p.57 for other examples). The work of Ekman and co suggest a role for evolutionary explanation because the affect program are pancultural and are homologous with

responses of related species. Setting aside the question of homology (to be dealt with later), Griffiths adds that more work needs to be done to turn the pancultural nature of a trait into evidence of its source in evolutionary history. For example, he says, the naming of tools is pancultural, but this is explained by the utility of doing so, rather than by our being descended from ancestors who named tools. And opponents of evolutionary explanations of emotion have similarly argued that humans have used their cognitive abilities to come up with the usual facial expressions of anger, fear and so on (eg Birdwhistell 1963). Yet this move wont work because the facial expressions are arbitrary as expressions of emotion (why should an eyebrow flash be an expression of anger?). He cites Darwin himself using the arbitrary nature of emotional expressions as evidence of their being the products of an evolutionary history: independent origination of the same features is to be expected only if the features are adaptive; if arbitrary, non-adaptive traits resemble one another, then this suggests a common ancestry, and the possession of traits by individuals is probably explained by descent (58). So the fact that emotional responses emerge in very early infancy speaks for an evolutionary explanation and against competing forms (59). But these data may also be thought to indicate that emotional expressions are innate; indeed, they may be thought to be innate because they have an evolutionary explanation. This, he stresses, is a confusion; innateness is itself a confused notion, for it confounds several independent properties, including: having an evolutionary explanation, being insensitive to variation in the developmental environment, being present at birth, being (in any of several senses) universal. Moreover, traits are assumed to be innate in some or all of these ways on the basis of having only one of these properties. He spends a couple of pages exemplifying mistakes and demonstrating the importance of dissociating these properties. He then discusses the various senses of universal: a trait can be present in all human populations (and in that sense it is universal) without being present in every individual (and universal in that sense, or its being part of human nature). Ekmans work suggests that affect programs are pancultural (or found in all human populations) but not that they are monomorphic. (He contrasts eye colour, which is certainly not monomorphic, with leg number, which certainly is.) So, the fact that a trait has an evolutionary history does not imply that it is monomorphic (polymorphic traits are often 7

maintained by evolutionary forces because the selective advantages of a trait are frequency dependent); similarly, because humans share much of their evolutionary history, but not all of it (reproductively isolated populations, genetic drift and founder effects), the fact that a trait has evolved does not entail that it will be pancultural. (See also the summary on p.104.) He ends the section with a discussion of the important concept of homology. 3.4 This section is devoted to Darwins theory of the evolution of emotion. The point is that two of the three principles that he articulated concerning the evolution of emotions are still central to modern theories. 3.5 Modern theories of the evolution of emotion tend to be much more broadly focused than Darwins. Here he wants to contrast theories that are unduly adaptationist with those that conform to approach fulfilment of the appropriate criteria of adequacy. He introduces Robert Franks Passions within reason, a broadly ecological account that he sees as developing a perspective hinted at by sociobiologists like Trivers. The explanatory problem is the irrationality of emotion from the perspective of calculative rationality. Thus, people refuse advantageous but exploitative relationships, are loyal or vengeful when rational calculations would counsel against acting in these ways. The key to Franks approach is the thought that although each of these behaviours is locally irrational, being disposed to produce [them] can be globally rationalit can be rational to adopt the strategy when in this situation, act irrationally (70): if a weaker party were perfectly rational a stronger party could count on this in harming that person, on the basis of the threat of still greater harm, but the weaker persons proclivity for irrational anger blocks such a strategy; a person known to be committed to notions of fairness may induce better offers than they might get otherwise because it is known that they can be counted on to refuse exploitative but nevertheless advantageous proposals. Frank links his theory to Darwins. It depends upon the ability of individuals to communicate their emotions andthrough themtheir behavioural disposition to others. Frank and his associates conducted experiments that tended to support these ideas (he returns to Frank later in the book).

3.6 Adaptationism bedevils evolutionary explanations, for adaptive hypotheses are all too easy to generate but very hard to test. Consequently, alternatives to evolutionary explanations tend to be side-lined or overwhelmed, and because there are so many plausible adaptationist stories that will do the trick, evoltionary theory threatens never to rise above the provision of how possibly stories (71). Adaptationism relies on a generalization of the form: any trait that can perform some function F will enhance the organisms fitness, so the existence of traits apt for performing F is explained as a result of selection. But, he objects, a traits relative fitness value depends on the environment and, in particular, the range of competing traits; furthermore, selective outcomes are subject to stochastic processes. So, successful adaptationist accounts only work when we have generalizations about the superiority of traits that hold across a wide range of environments and are robust in the face of chance perturbations. There are unlikely to be many of these generalizations (71): evolutionary biology is a historical science (if we could replay the tape of life it would turn out differently every time). The historicity of evolution means that adaptive forces are insufficient to predict or explain [even though they may be necessary] what has occurred. They require supplementation by a rich set of historical assumptions (72). Appeal to adaptive forces is good for showing how they would explain an observed trait if the assumptions made were true. But, when there are different suites of forces that are equally plausible, then the strategys implicit reliance on a principle of argument to the best explanation doesnt work. Thus: the traditional savanna theory of human brain expansion, the acquatic ape theory, the thermoregulation hypothesis and the macchiavellian intelligence hypothesis all give excellent explanations of the growth in human brain size if their historical assumptions are granted (72). So we have to find ways to test those assumptions directly. Biologists are today finding ways of doing so, which means that certain sets of assumptions can be discarded, so that the argument to the best explanation is valid (or they can stimulate the search for non-evolutionary explanations if no assumptions hold). He gives examples of phylogenetic studies that have tested assumptions (rhinoceros horns), and goes on to discuss three ways in which adaptive explanations can be constrained by association with phylogenetic trees (73-4). Finally he discusses how all 9

this might affect evolutionary studies of emotion. He is tough on Plutchik, for his ahistorical adaptationist story, and judges Franks to be interesting but yet to be shown to be more than that. 4. Affect programs and emotion modules In this chapter he discusses affect programs in the context of contemporary cognitive science. He suggests that the theories he has considered indicate the following outline of an account of affect program emotions: they are complex, automated processes co-ordinated by a central program or resulting from characteristic patterns of interaction between the various bodily systems involved in the response. Percpetual information flows to the mechanisms controlling responses in ways that make them separate from the flow of information to the cognitive processes responsible for intentional action. It is this modularity that accounts fo the lack of fit between emotional responses and conscious evaluations of the significance of stimuli. (See 97-9, for more). 5. The Higer Cognitive Emotions: Some research programs The affect program system has had some success; yet there are a large number of emotions that it does not cover (in the sense that competent speakers recognise as emotions states that do not conform to AP emotions). Sometimes theorists stipulate that mental states that do not conform to their model are not emotions; sometimes they state that their models will cover these when they are extended. These are bad moves (100). So he wants to discuss what he calls the higher cognitive emotions, those that seem not to be automatic, modular and so on, and are often integrally involved in cognitive activity that leads to planned long-term action. He also thinks it important to look at the findings of social constructionists, which suggest that the emotional phenotypes of members of different societies vary significantly. He considers whether it is plausible to explain these non-AP emotions as blends of AP responses, and after considering the case dismisses it (101-2). He turns then to the notion that the AP emotions + higher cognitive activity give the non-AP emotions, as this is suggested by Damasio. He spends three careful pages sensitively discussing Damasios case, concluding, finally, that he is another victim of the confusions attaching to the

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notion of innateness (see above, and p.103-6), reiterating that facts about development block any simple inference from the fact that a trait has a complex dependence on environmental inputs to the conclusion that it does not have a direct evolutionary explanation (106). 5.2 The evolutionary psychology paradigm. EPs adds to the tools of sociobiology an approach to the explanation of behaviour derived from computationalist cognitive science and the Chomskyan tradition in psycholinguistics. EP makes much of the distinction between the adaptiveness of a trait (its current contribution to reproductive fitness) and the fact that the trait is an adaptation (it is explained by natural selection): thus, the vestigial appendix of humans is an adaptation, but it is not adaptive, whereas reading is certainlythese daysadaptive, but not an adapatation (even though it is a side-effect of other adaptations). It also accepts David Marrs (Vision: 1982) three level approach to explanation in psychology: level 1 describes the task that the psychological system accomplishes; level 2, describes how the computational tasks are carried out, and level 3 describes how the computational processes are implemented in the brain. If, under this model, psychology is assigned level 2, and neuroscience level 3, then EP suggests that evolutionary theory provides a way of describing the mind at the highest level, that of task description. Tooby and Cosmides argue that although, as in the case of vision, the high level task description sometimes coincides with common sense, at others it does not (their social cheater detection task, e.g.); they also suggest that evolutionary considerations impose a broad filter (solvability criterion) on theories about psychological mechanisms (thus, a mechanism for social contracts that was vulnerable to significant cheating could not have evolved). Evolutionary considerations also provide an ordering and explanatory role. EP hold that their clear distinction between adaptiveness and adaptation answers many of the criticisms of sociobiology, but he has reservations: 1) it is committed to the view that human cognitive mechanisms are monomorphic, with any mental differences ascribed to the local environment; 2) it still does not go far enough in acknowledging the

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importance of developmental resources; 3) it is adaptationist. The rest of the chapter (5.35.6) is devoted to discussing these reservations (and to Franks work). He repeats and amplifies the argument against adaptationism, and in favour of adaptive-historical explanation, with its sensitivity to the phylogenetic trajectory described by contemporary organisms. He makes short shrift of the monomorphic mind: on the ground that it makes a miracle of ordinary truths about polymorphisms compatability with the existence of complex adaptive traits (123-4); there is no reason to believe, as they assert, that variation stems from the response of a single genetic program to environmental variation; their reason for maintaining this position is its presumed power to counter racism, but this is neither a strong nor a necessary position (125). He is more sympathetic to, without endorsing, EPs picture of developmental psychology; it has to be highly sensitive to developmentfor, without it, theres no way to generate/explain variability from a monomorphic mindbut, ultimately, it conceives development in terms of pernicious dualisms, nature v nurture, genes v environment, biology v culture (126-132). 5.7 Defends the idea that emotions are heterogeneously constructed, through the interaction of factors traditionally distributed across categories like biological and cultural, as well as by those hard to pigeon-hole in those terms. He introduces the distinction between determinisms and interaction (additive and non-additive) and argues that the only defensible picture is that of the non-additive interaction of factors, which is what DST makes central. This leads him to stress the importance of culture as factor in the construction of the psychological phenotype; and then to the next chapter. 6. The social construction of emotion Social constructionism starts from the obvious fact that emotional phenomena vary considerably across cultures; it goes on to deny that there is any essence to an emotion which can be reidentified across different social contexts[so r]ather than saying that the same emotion has different effects or interpreted differently, they have claimed in every case that different cultures have different emotions (137). Griffiths says that if we interpret social constructionism as making the claim that elements of local cultures feed by a number of different routes into the emotional 12

phenotype, then it can fit with the picture of heterogeneous construction hes sketched, and is perfectly compatible with what is known of the evolutionary basis of emotion. He also thinks that soc. const. implies that much of what people say about their emotions is not a transparent description of their psychological processescertain emotional responses may be the acting out of myths about the mind in the same way that ghost possession is the acting out of metaphysical beliefs (138). If they are right about this, then it supports his claim that conceptual revision will be required in order to construct a scientific psychology of emotion. However, soc. const wont work if it applies to everything in the way of emotions. He distinguishes between social role and the social concept models of constructionism found in the literature. The second is favoured by philosophers (such as Solomon) who run with the PAT approach, except that the categories into which the world must be classified, and which are foundational to emotions, are cultural rather than natural. So, if a culture doesnt have the right concepts, then its members wont experience the emotion defined in terms of them (see 138-9) Just as fear requires the belief that the current situation is dangerous, and jealousy the belief that something one cherishes is under threat of being lost to another, any given emotion will depend on a local concept..as go the concepts, so go the emotions as well (Solomon, cited 139). The social concept model, in being concerned with defining categories, focuses on factors eliciting emotions, and it is only a model of emotions themselves if we accept its identification of them with the thought that the eliciting circumstances obtain. The social role model is more focused on the output side of emotionthe process by which emotions are manifested. The psychologist J.R Averill is his main source for this perspective: he sees an emotion as a transitory social role (a socially constituted syndrome) that includes and individuals appraisal of the situation, and is interpreted as a passion rather than an action (139). PG thinks that the last part of this conception is what gives the view plausibility: although emotions are normally thought to happen rather than acted out, i.e. they are are thought of as passions rather than actions, Averill sees them as disclaimed actions: actions we take, but which are presented as something we suffer, this itself being part of the role. [Strong echoes of Goffmann?] In support, Averill (and PG finds this compelling) recounts Gururumba experience of being a wild pig, a state 13

they suffer, but the epidemiology of the state suggests it is a response to very great pressures, one which brings the sufferer special consideration. So, the argument is, its an action, but is not acknowledged as such [by anyone in the society]it is part of the wildpig role that wild-pig behaviour is involuntary (140). He also discusses Hacking on the construction of multiple personality disorder, the symptomatology of which evolved in step with theories of the disorder; now knowledge of the behaviour associated with the syndrome is sufficiently widespread for it to be part of local culture. PG also speculates that something like amok behaviour is now part of a syndrome taken up by young Western men (probably derived from contemporary action films), who, when they believe they have no options offering any self-respect, start shooting at strangers in a state of being out of control. [A bold claim, perhaps.] Disclaimed action is central to some emotions, then, on Averills view. Actions are taken, but they are represented as natural and inevitable responses to events, and as outside the individuals control; consequently, actors gain consideration they wouldnt otherwise get. The Gururumba wild pig man and the impetuous person carried away by love are both making claims to be excused for their casting aside of normal social ties (and their actions do not challenge the legitimacy of those ties [they may evenmay they not, Sonny Jimliken their situation to one who has had a dreadful accident?]) PG suggests, though, the idea of disclaimed action need be central to the social role model of constructionism. He thinks Averill, who speaks of such actions as planned, has too narrow a conception of what is involved in intentional behaviour. PG responds that a drivers responses depend upon conformity with social norms, but these, though intentional are not usually conscious and need involve no planning. There is no explaining the behaviour without mention of the norms and the drivers observance of them, but his observance involves no conscious invocation of them at the time of his actions; rather the norms are part of the history that explains his being in the position to act thus and so. Socially constructed emotional responses may be automatic in the same wayThe emotion may depend on the [cultural] model in the diachronic sense that the existence of the model in the culture helped shape what is now a relatively automatic reaction to certain situations (142). PG refers to this as the reinforcement version of the

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social role model, to distinguish it from the disclaimed action version. He quotes a passage from Averill that suggests he too had this in mind. The key difference between the social concept and the social role models is that the first sees having an emotion as thinking of a current situation as one which is appropriate to a particular emotion, whereas the latter sees it as manifesting behaviour that constitutes a cultures model of a particular emotion. 6.2: Getting construction right: The social role model is superior the social concept model, for it can incorporate all the latters insights, such as they are. The social concept model is either grossly inadequate of is a perverse way of stating the social role model; it also conflates importantly different senses in which something can be said to be socially constructed. The social concept model suggests, rightly, that being a competent member of a given culture is knowing when to manifest the appropriate emotion; but this insight is already there in the social role model. A social role is not just a pattern of behaviour, but one that involves an appropriate grasp of when its performance is required or acceptable; it may also have built into it an interpretation of the role, as a moral duty as a natural inclination [not so sure about this, at least if is thought of as being normative in just the way that behaviour itself is]. These consideration apply to the social role model of emotion too, so this covers the social concept insight (143-4). A major weakness of the social concept model, which makes the identity of a socially constructed emotion depend entirely on the situation that elicits it, is that it seems to rule out what seems to be altogether plausiblethat two cultures could demand different emotional responses to the same situation. We have no problem with the idea that in one culture a threat to a child elicits one sort of response, while in another, with the same concepts of threat and response, a different response was required. The social concept model says that these cultures have a different concept of threat or infant, as is shown by their different responses. PG cites Rom Harr as saying that two cultures cannot share the same emotion of fear if one sees a given response as shameful and the other as praiseworthy. [He seems to be muddling concept and conception?] PG sees this as poor conceptual analysis, one implying an extreme holism about meaning that would

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entail only exact replicas were able to communicate. It is not true, either, as the social concept model implies, that our concept of danger includes a specification of all that we believe about fear (144-5). The social concept model says that emotions involve the thought that a situation is of a certain type, which involves the use of categories derived from the local culturethe categories are socially constructed. There are at least three senses in which categories can be socially constructed: 1) the trivial sense in which all concepts depend upon linguistic practices; at this level all concepts are the samethey depend upon a community of speakers and came into being through a sociolinguistic process. 2) Citizen, MPs and dog licences are socially constructued in ways that clades, electron and magnesium are not; the latter categories were in existence (their members had properties in common) before we developed terms to refer to them, but MPs and citizens (and, according to Hacking, various other categories, like abused child and multiple personality patients) were categories of persons that we brought into being. These two senses in which categories are constructed carry no implications about the reality of their membersMPs and Euros are just as real as electrons, and nobody feels the existence of the former to be ersatz for being a social construction; they are overt constructions. But there is a sense, 3) of social construction that does imply that no such thing existswitch or ghost possession, for exampleand if those who use the concept come to believe that it is no more than a construction then it would disrupt the way it is used: these are covert constructions. PG says Averills social role model depicts the class of emotions hes interested in as covert social constructions: they are a collective pretence that people are subject to certain natural and involuntary passions. [It might be interesting to look at the legal treatment of those in these different sorts of emotionsaffect program states, pure and simple, versus socially constructed states?] PG says that social concept theorists seem to treat emotions as overt social constructions, for the category that the current situation is thought to fall into is a social contruction in that sensejust as the category MP is (1478). Sometimes they even suggest that emotions are constructions in the first sense.

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PG argues that the social role model represents the only interesting constructionist account. If emotions are social constructions only on the grounds that they are thoughts and all concepts are constructions in the first sense, then they are not differentiated from other thoughts [and the explanandum evaporates], such as the thought that chlorine has more than one isotope (148). If they are thought to be constructions in the second sense, that is they are takens as thoughts on par with something like the thought that something is illegal [or the thought that I have $100], then this too is pretty weak. Averills is a radical suggestion: people live quite happily with the idea somethings being illegal or foreign is a social construction, but not with the idea that love or jealousy arent natural and inevitable. Averills position does, and those of the social concept theorists do not, pinpoint the specifics of emotions, which are interpreted as passions rather than actions. 6.3 The problem of sincerity: Here he discusses disclaimed action because the notion has been used by some social role theorists who see some emotional behaviours as strategic. He does so in relation to traditional constructionist objections (usually deriving from Sartres analysis of emotions) that want to see such strategic emotions as insincere and self-deceiving. PG argues (150-3) that Sartre misunderstands the nature of unconscious processes (which are now central to explanations in modern cognitive science), and describes current understandings of the computational unconscious, which he feels can be used to give a relatively unproblematic account of the sincerity of disclaimed action emotions (152). It also allows for flexibility in the processes distinguished as conscious or unconscious; the same process, in the same individual, can be conscious sometimes and not on others (like car-driving). So disclaimed action emotions can therefore be more or less sincere, depending on the extent to which the subject realises that his responses are voluntarily initiated or exaggerateda whole range of possibilities, such as straightforward pretending, mere inattention to ones motivation, self-deceit and real deep-seated inability to get at ones motivation [can be distinguished] (154). Thus, he feels his account shows how the unconscious production of emtions can be fitted into conventional cognitive psychology, so that both the disclaimed action and reinforcement versions of social role models of emotion can be countenanced (155).

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6.4: Social construction and heterogeneous construction Here he discusses the way the two versions of the social role model fit into his earlier account of the heterogeneous construction of emotional phenotypes. The reinforcement version is straightforward while the disclaimed action version is not. The former, being grounded in social norms, are developmental influences that can interact with the processes usually seen as biological (156; see also top of 157, for the importance of looking at both differences and similarities in emotions cross-culturally). Disclaimed action emotions cannot be so integrated. This is not because of the way they are constructed, which process is dependent on the same range of factors as the reinforced emotions (and there is some discussion of the possibility that strategic behaviours that are interpreted as natural and involuntary is an ancient human trait [158]), but because of the way they are implemented, which involves a new layer of mechanisms. This is because they are attempts to mimic other emotional responses; they are essentially pretences, and can be sincere only in the way ghost possession can be sincere, which involves a subjects lacking conscious access to the cause of their behaviour and providing an erroneous explanationthat masquerades as an introspective report (158). Summing up, he says that both versions of the social role model are locally represented as universal and natural responses that are not actions to be explained in terms of the agents goal and intentions (158). In the case of the reinforced responses this representation is correct about the second part but not about the first, for they are local responses, even though they are not pretences. In the case of disclaimed action emotions, however, both aspects of the local representation are incorrect: they are not universal and they can be illuminated by looking at the agents goals and intentions (1589) 6.5 The limits of social constructionism. Starts with a discussion of Rom Harrs position that all or nearly all emotions are socially constructed. PG sees this as greatly exaggerated. Harrs strategy is to show that emotions show the between-groups difference and within-group similarity that is usually thought to require cultural explanation, but modern evolutionary theory shows how 18

such patterns can be explained naturalistically without recourse to any appeal to fundamental onotological contrasts between biology and culture. In his DST approach, genetic and extregenetic developmental resources are equally candidates for explanation in terms of descent with modification. This implies that emotional phenomena should be grouped together at various levels of generality in a way that reflects patterns of descent[,so that] systems of classification will extend from very broad homologies ranging across species to very narrow homologies ranging across human populations (160). On this view, narrow homologies reflect recent microevolution and broad, ancient. The patterns of emotional differences across cultures can usefully be thought of in terms of hyper- and hypocognition of particular states (due to Heelas). Love is currently hypercognised in the West, but it isnt necessarily absent even in cultures that have no lexemic concept of it. On the approach PG takes, difference and similarities across cultures are significant for understanding emotion, since these are relevant to understanding processes of descent. The strong constructionists like Harr and Armon-Jones want to classify emotions in terms of what causes them, so if an emotion output is caused by spiders and exposed electric wires in one culture, but by scorpions and witch doctors in another, then its a manifestation of different emotions (162). Naturalists, by contrast, give broad, functional definitions of appropriate elicitorsFear should be elicited by dangers (162). The constructionists are in the grip of a traditional propositional attitude theory, of the sort he discussed in chapter 2. Armon-Jones et al take what they see as an antiessentialist line, believing that the there is nothing to emotion but the things that cause it and the behaviour it results in. They wont see fear as the belief that something is dangerous conjoined with a desire to avoid harm, because the details of the something about which the belief is entertained suffice to differentiate emotions. PG says that they require a further argument to show that there can be no more abstract taxonomy of emotions. Armon-Jones is the only person to provide such an argument, but it assumes that the only candidate criterion of identity across cultures would have to be a feeling, which proposal she attacks on neo-Wittgensteinian grounds. PG thinks this doesnt wash,

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since the main candidates for criteria of identity produced by naturalists are behavioural syndromes, neural structures, and sets of beliefs and desires [abstractly characterised] (163). A propositional attitude approach that characterises beliefs and desires quite generally actually undermines Armon-Jones position, for it can cope with the idea that beliefs and desires vary cross-culturally. Arguments mounted, by Ratner, for example, against the identification of behavioural syndromes across cultures, rely on the confused concept of innateness he discussed earlier, and make any explanation impossible, for all explanation depends upon categories that abstract away from detail (164-5). The nature of explanation, and the sorts of psychological concepts, we need to explain emotions is the topic of part II.

The nature of psychological categories

7. Natural kinds and theoretical concepts Approaches emotion and emotions as natural kinds: categories that correspond to real differences in nature, in respect of which it is possible to construct theories. So, anger is what is referred to in theories that successfully account for the phenomena picked out by the vernacular use of anger. There is no reason, though, to expect that the latter will remain unchanged by successful theories: we may have to reconceptualise both the generic category and specific emotions in order to explain them successfully. Succesful explanation results in reordering of the phenomena across categories. Phenomena with the same explanation should be placed together and phenomena with different explanations drawn apart (171) He cites Aristotelian conceptualisation of the superlunary as a category that had to be reconceptualised because it was of no explanatory use. Conceptual change is entirely usual, as the last twenty years of philosophy of science and philosophy of language has made clear. The eclipse of description theories of the meaning of theoretical terms by causal theories has given much more purchase on the phenomenon of reference; kind terms in language have referential (and therefore causal) relations with their referents: My concept of cat is about cats because its existence

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depends by the particular kind of causal pathway appropriate to being about (172). This enabled us to account for transtheoretic identity of terms in science (which our intuitions had supportedwe and the ancients have different beliefs or conceptions of stars, but not different concepts). Changes in scientific knowledge, and the conceptual revision this sometimes entails, may cause people to revise both the intension and the extension of a theoretical term (172-3). Thus, birds are now classified as reptiles and whales are no longer fish. The causal theory says that a term is understood as a stereotypea set of beliefs about the terms referent, which pick out the extension of the term. Changes of intension are changes in the stereotype attendant upon new discoveries about the referent of the term, and these may also mean that the extension changes. This sketch relates to the main early versions of causal theories. His aim in this chapter is to show how the latest work on theoretical terms is incompatible with the a priori conceptual approach to emotions that dominates the literature. 7.2 Natural kinds and realist metaphysics: The central idea of a natural kind, which is philosophically ancient, is that there are underlying explanations of the correlations of properties that allow us to sort things into distinct kinds (173). And we have reality right when we can put together things in ways that reflect these underlying explanations. Thus, when we put organisms into species, or substances into chemical elements, we have projectable categories, which can be relied upon to hold in new instances. A new organism that passes the test for membership of a species will have the other features characteristic of the species but not specified in the test (174). Similarly, when new knowledge is gained about some members of such a category, it can be projected to other members. He argues that natural kinds provide the ontological basis for a solution to the problem of induction. Putnam initially gave natural kind concepts a strongly realist interpretation, but later changed his position, and now claims that categories depend on the theoretical concepts that represent them, so that the world cannot be clearly separated from mind and its concepts. Boyd, though, has argued that the theory of natural kinds need not be committed to metaphysical realism. Natural kinds are postulated to explain scientific

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practice: theorists seek projectable concepts so they can be used in induction and explanation, which concepts are judged on the basis of background theorythey are designed to pick out categories which have a role in our current best theory of the domain (174). Because the current best theory is committed to the existence of such categories, concepts which pick them out have the best chance of being projectable. Boyd offers this picture because realists can say that the concepts are projectable because they pick out categories based in real essences; non-realists can accept his picture while retaining their reservations about realism; empiricists can say that empirically adequate background theories provide the grounds for the construction of projectable concepts; Kitchers Kantian realist can say that natural kinds represent the extensions of predicates central to our explanatory schemata and are projectable in the limit as our practices develop to cover more and more phenomena (175). PG wants to supplement Boyds account with findings about the formation and use of concepts by humans in general, and to show how the theory of natural kinds, as a central aspect of the best scientific accounts, can be construed as an adequacy condition for any account of the mind/language link. He stresses that category in his usage refers to an aspect of reality, while concept refers to the psychological entity that corresponds to the category. Natural kind concepts, thus, have categories as their referents. 7.3 Theories of concepts. The classical theory of concepts has it that they are defined by sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Philosophers had two objections to this: convincing lists of conditions are almost impossible to draw up for most concepts; most seem to have an essential vagueness about their boundaries. Psychologists also pointed to a third problem: the classical view fails to account for the typicality of conceptsnative users regard certain objects as better instances of the concept than others (they are recalled faster and with less error than other instances). Prototype and similar theories were developed to replace the classical view: inspired by Wittgensteins notion of a family resemblance, Eleanor Rosch and others proposed that there is no set of properties possessed by all and only the instances of a concept; rather, each instance has a sufficient number of features characteristic of that 22

which is gathered under the concept to make it a member. In prototype theory the proposal was that a prototype of the concept was constructed inductively; new instances were brought under the concept if they were sufficiently similar to the prototype. Attempts to improve on this general approach led to exemplar theory (in which a set of exemplars serves as the basis for judgements about new objects, rather than an abstract prototype). This family of approaches are formal in the sense that they claim concepts are constructed by applying a formal rule to a set of features, such that particulars are clustered according to the features they possess. Theory aims to produce an account of the rules used. PG reminds us of the philosophical literature on the difficulties of the notion of similarity (especially the work of Nelson Goodman). Objects have indefinitely many properties and there is no such thing as overall similarity, only similarity with respect to particular (sets of) properties: different propertiesdifferent clusters of particulars. Properties need to be weighted, and this can only be done in the light of theory (e.g., deciding that the number of legs and the number of stripes are equally significant involves a substantial theoretical decision (178). He points out the parallels between psychological approaches to concepts and the controversies about classification in biology (pheneticists, who wanted an objective, theory-free basis v. cladists, who use data relevant to likely patterns of evolutionary relationship). The cladists definitively won the battle, because organisms have evolved through successive speciation events (see 178). A new approach to concept formation takes this lesson seriously; the theory view says that formal approaches have assumed the answer to the most pressing question involved in concept acquisitionfeature selection (179). People use background theories when acquiring a new concept, using those that seem appropriate to the domain (say a new organism v. a new tool). Feature lists and similarity metrics are based on peoples background knowledge/theory of the domain, so the clustering of objects is a function of previous understanding, not a neutral basis from which understanding is achieved (180). 7.4 Developmental evidence for the theory view of concepts:

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The best evidence for the theory view comes from studies of the acquisition of concepts in children. In this section PG summarises the work of Keil and his collaborators. Good and interesting, see 180-7: see also summary of Pascal Boyers book). 7.5 Natural kinds and causal homeostasis: useful concepts allow extrapolation from observed to unobserved because they represent projectable categories. Developmental evidence suggests that people cluster instances in the search for projectable categories according as they possess significant properties on the theories of the domain they already possess. Children have relatively simple theories and culturally universal theories that become more complex and explicit as they grow older, whereupon they diverge as between individuals and cultures. Conceptual change in science is an extension of this process (188). PG likes Boyd and Keils notion of causal homeostasis as a way of capturing what makes a concept useful: a concept picks out a category that brings together objects with correlated properties; it has causal homeostasis if the set of correlations has some underlying explanation that makes it projectable. The search for causal homeostatic mechanisms explains what is known as psychological essentialism: people do not simply note the existence of clusters of properties but postulate underlying causes of the clusteringan essence that each particular has. Causal homeostasis allows for a very broad conception of the essence of a category (just as psychological development shows that the sort of concept used is very domain specific); microstructural essences of the sort discussed for elements, biological taxa, which share properties because of descent from a common ancestor, human artefacts, which are essentialised in terms of function and design, and so on. There seems to be a continuum between traditional natural kinds and the sorts of kinds that are more purely nominal (eg uncle and breakfast) (188-190). He takes a couple of pages to address concerns and objections that have been raised against this perspective. He concedes that there may be cases where more than one legitimate taxonomy of a domain. He discusses trees, which warrant an ecological account of the causal homeostatic basis of the category, even though theyre not a geneological unit (they evolved in several distinct taxa).

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Finally, he addresses Atrans argument that it will be very hard to get humans to accept evolutionary theory given their universal tendency to assume that species have a microstructural essence. PG thinks this is yet another example of the pernicious effects of an uncritical notion of innateness. He doesnt see any reason why we cant enrich the developmental resources available to children by giving them better concepts (education about evolutionary theory, in short). On his favoured DST approach, development is not the unfolding of a genetic program, but depends upon the availability of a range of reliable transgenerational resouces, so there is no reason why these shouldnt include good concepts from evolutionary theory. 7.6 Intertheoretic identities and conceptual revision: a causal homeostatic theory of concepts explains two important features of science that description theories could not: the changes in the intension and extension of concepts that attend changes in theory; concepts retain their identity across theory change. The first is explained by the way that the core of each concept relates to the causal homeostasis underlying the category it refers to. For these often take the form of an explanation sketch or a promissory note for one: the causal homeostasis account merely requires that explanatory concepts commit their uses to the project of discerning categories displaying causal homeostasis; it is the pursuit of this project that brings about revision of extension and intension. The extension of concepts changes to track the categories displaying causal homeostasis; if I want to be able to predict the spread of a disease [through] forests, I will revise my tree concepts in the light of new discoveries about evolutionary relationships [between the different sorts of tree] (193). The intension of concepts is sometimes revised simply because features arent as crucial to the causal homeostasis of the category as used to be thought. Thus, when the monotremes were included in Mammalia, giving birth to live young ceased to be a universal feature of mammals. But it can be more straightforward, as when a child learns that the universal feature of adulthood is not a projectable aspect of being an uncle: it is an accident that its uncles are adults. He turns then to intertheoretic identities; he distinguishes between

phenomenological terms like gold or Aves, and those that refer to causal homeostatic mechanisms underlying the first set of terms. He needs to be able to account for the fact that, for example, both creationists and evolutionists use the term Aves. He says they both 25

refer to the same set of features, but this is merely an empirical, psychological fact, and it has no metaphysical consequences. He likes Kroons notion of the overdetermination of reference by theory, which stresses that scientists take more chances in coming up with theories than they need to by the causal homeostatic theorys lights. Why not play safe and achieve reference by using a theoretical term with the cognitive content whatever is responsible for such and such phenomena [which is pretty much the line Mendel used with gene?]. Scientists dont though (egs 194-5), they tend to commit themselves to quite detailed accounts of the mechanisms. Kroon reads this as implying a causal descriptive theory of reference for theoretical terms (195), which picture PG sees as a contribution to the psychology of concepts. Theoretical concepts are introduced to refer to the mechanisms responsible for causal homeostasis in certain phenomenological categories (195). The cognitive content of a theoretical concept is a sketch of how causal homeostasis is achieved, and two such concepts are co-referential if they explain more or less the same cluster of features using more or less the same causal structure. However, if extensionally similar phenomenological concepts are associated with theoretical terms postulating very different causal structures then the similar extensions of the phenomenological concepts will not suffice to make the theoretical terms co-referential. Thus while pre-Darwinian and contemporary biologists use the same taxonomic groups, there is no identity between the formers platonic species and the latters notion of resemblance produced by common descent. 7.7 Social constructionism and causal homeostasis: In this section he turns to Ian Hackings recent work on multiple personality syndrome (MPS) and child abuse. This suggests how concepts change when they are not confined to the spectator sports of explanation and induction (so placing an occurrence under the concept murder has implications about what should be done about it and how we should evaluate it). Hackings work documents how changes to the extension and intension of the concept of child abuse relates to the political and social agendas of those using the concept. Applying a concept that originally applied to battered babies to older children

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exposed to adult sexuality is an aspect of a reform movement and not a claim about the projectability of discoveries about battered babies to preteens exposed to sexuality. He discusses Hackings notion of dynamic nominalism, for the causal homeostasis view needs to respond to it. The causal homeostasis view says that a concept is useful if there is some category, to which it refers, that involves some underlying mechanism that produced the resemblances between members of the category. Hacking raises the possibility that the causal homeostatic mechanism for a category might be the existence of the concept of that category and the broader sociolinguistic practices in which the concept is used (196-7). So, there might be good, robust generalisations about the effects of child abuse precisely because of the existence of the concept of child abuse, which inclines those exposed to the experience to see it in a particular way. Hackings work on MPS suggests strongly that the diagnostic categories were incorporated into the experiences of those to whom they were applied in ways that made the categories selfvalidating. PG thinks his view needs to acknowledge that some categories may have causal homeostasis through the reflexive mechanism Hackings dynamic nominalism sets forth. It also needs to acknowledge that there are other dynamics at work in conceptual change apart from those of the causal homeostatic model. The first of these he sees as something already incorporated into his notion of substantially socially constructed emotions, wherein the existence of a particular emotion in individuals may be the result of the existence of the corresponding emotion concept within a culture. Prevalent beliefs about emotion may be an important developmental resources for individuals [and therefore part of what accounts for the psychological phenotype] (197). Hence, the existence of a nonarbitrary category is dependent on social process involving the concept of the category. He insists, though, that we must distinguish this from the trivial claim that the emotion concept is the result of social processes. Richard Boyd formulates the same thought in his principle of the metaphysical innocence of theory construction, which states that if our conceptual systems affect the world, they do so via some natural causal mechanism; social constructionism is fine and useful if it alleges that the introduction of some concept has an effect on the world via

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some causal mechanism, but it is trivial or false when it alleges that the introduction of a concept in and of itself changes the world: it is trivial if means that things not previously brought under the concept are now; it is false if it means that putting things under a concept makes them similar in ways that they were not similar before (198). (Hacking suggests that a new classification can affect how a persontruthfullyreports what they remember about events in the distant past, but the classification isnt thereby affecting the events.) Hacking also makes us realise that many things affect the dynamics of conceptual change. Concepts are used for social and political ends, and may evolve under such pressure. PG says the advent of the concept of love may have served to make for better relations between the sexes in medieval society, but it need not have done much for the understanding of the mind that used. On the contrary: it may have achieved its [?] purpose precisely by misrepresenting to medieval people how their minds worked (199; see too his remarks about child abuse). All this means, though, that we need to separate issues of nonepistemic dynamics and issues of multiple epistemic projects. So, many of the objects that can be classified as money can also be classified as lumps of matter: the former classification recognises a cluster of social and economic properties common to many different currencies, while classifying some of them as gold recognises another cluster of properties. Cross-cutting taxonomies are typical of the life [and social] sciences, but they are not in competition with one another, unlike the nonepistemic classifications Hacking discusses. Nonepistemic dynamics mean that causal homeostasis cant be the whole of the story, perhaps not even for science [especially these days, when rewards are not distributed in accordance with epistemic gains so much as appeal to various others, many of whom arent interested in epistemic gains]. In that respect, causal homeostasis theory is a censored model; it says how concepts would evolve if the only goals of those using them were epistemic. From his perspective, then, thought about emotions will have to remain heterogeneous: vernacular concepts of emotion wont be captured by the causal homeostatic model, whereas those used by serious enquirers should, at least. But this also

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suggests that there could be a field of social-historical inquiry about the social projects of vernacular life that involve emotion concepts, but it wouldnt look quite the same as those produced by researchers in the grip of simple-minded notion of constructionism. 8. Natural kinds in biology and psychology 8.1 Natural kinds in biology. Biological species are paradigmatic natural kinds, along with chemical elements, but contrary to what has been thought, the two are very different sorts of kind. The microstructural essence of elements is very different from that defining species, which are historical entities, and are a kind in virtue of their common history rather than any intrinsic resemblance. Essentialist definitions of species fail because they try to combine Darwinian views on evolutionary processes with Aristotelian view of its products (203-4). Hull & Ghiselin have noted this and say that species are individuals spatiotemporally located particulars like New Zealand or the Swiss Family Robinson [So] an organisms membership of a species is like membership of a family (204). No matter how close it is, resemblance between cannot make organisms with different ancestors members of the same species. The historical processes that produce species are as much influenced by initial conditions and background conditions as they are by any underlying laws, and they are subject to chance events. [All of which, in the realm of social science, Weber understood perfectly well.] So adaptive forces are the product of local conditions, and their effects are subject to the suite of existing organisms, the nature and order of mutations as well as chance. So biological taxa have historical essences and these identify the causal homeostatic mechanismcommon descentthat makes taxa into projectable categories (205). He then shows that these claims are substantiated by the principles of classification adopted in biological systematics: hence, the failure of the phenetics program and the success of cladistics, wherein homologous (due to common descent) and homoplastic (due to convergent evolution) traits are always differentiated. Phenetics did not, and cladistics did, discover an underlying structure to biological diversity. Members of clusters resemble one another because of their common history, gene flow, developmental canalisation and the selective regimes in which populations live (206). 29

He asks why we cant save essentialist approaches by appealing to common selection pressures (which do account for convergences between bats and birds, cetaceans and fish). He then spends a few pages (207-210) outlining the principles of cladisitc analysis as a prelude to answering the question. 8.3 Clades as natural kinds. Biological taxa are not unified by a shared microstructure, and this led Hull and Ghiselin to deny that they are kinds or categories at all; they suggested instead that taxa are individual objects, so that species names are more like proper names than natural kind terms. The essence of an individual (the bearer of a proper name) is given by its historical origins; the essence of a microstructurally defined kind, like gold, doesnt (something is gold, no matter how, when or where it comes into being, if it has atomic number 79). PG thinks Hull and Ghiselin are right about individuality of biological taxa, but thinks they are wrong about natural kinds. Their view of natural kinds is tied too strongly to a conception of natural kind that is driven by an outdated philosophy of science. His causal homeostatic model allows for all sorts of possible mechanisms, not just microstructural essences. The latter were priveleged in the days of positivism because they were ripe for a role in exceptionless empirical generalisationsnatural laws. The unification of science, with the privileged realm of physics providing the foundations, imagined by positivism or logical empiricism has now been seen given up. The unity of science is now represented by a commitment merely to superveniencehigher level accounts of the world have to acknowledge that there is no change at their level that is independent of changes at micro-levels. So laws are no longer the touchstone. One gets knowledge where one can, so qualified generalisations are not to be rejected on that account, for they are the only way to uncover regularities immanent in natural processes. To reduce these sciences of such generalisations to their physical substrate is to eschew some epistemic access to that regularity. It is to know less about reality (213). On this view, natural kinds are not restricted to the subjects of fundamental laws; they are just non-arbitrary groupings natural phenomena, groupings that give some degree of projectability. Cladistic categories are highly projectable, and cladistic kinds, like other natural kinds, are the subjects of true, counterfactual supporting, empirical

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generalisations, even if these generalisations do not conform to the traditional ideal of natural law (213). 8.4 A cladistic approach to biological traits. If the natural kinds of organisms are cladistic taxa, it would seem to follow that the natural kinds of traits are cladistic homologues. He reprises the difference between homologues and analogues (traits that are homoplasicthe result of parallel evolution), and discusses the way modern theory has grounded older convictions about the difference between the two sorts of trait. The he gets down to business: in proposing that traits be classified cladistically, he opposes a number of authors (psychologists as well as philosophers of biology) who claim that basic biological categories are functional: that homologous traits should be classified together only if they have performed similar functions in recent evolutionary history, and homoplastic traits should be freely grouped together if they meet this condition (215). So if traits are adaptations to the same ends, then they should be grouped together. Teleonomy (adaptive purpose) is the basis of the categorisation of psychological traits, according to McNaughton, for example. He quotes Karen Neander (who follows Ruth Millikan) on hearts, which are morphologically diverse across and within species (the latter due to variation, pathology and so on), but which are classified thus because they all organs for pumping blood. He reads her as making two claims for proper functional taxonomies: 1) they are required for cross-species generalisations; 2) only a proper functional taxonomy will allow us sort normal from pathological variants. The second is a red herring, he says. Although proper functional taxonomy does allow type identities between normal and abnormal variants, an item has its biological proper function in virtue of its selective history[so] it retains [that] function no matter how damaged or diseased it is (215-6). So biological functions are an aspect of evolutionary history, and functional kinds are linked to cladistic kinds. Consequently, functional kinds are either coextensive with cladistic kinds or with disjunctions of them. He sees this as an important conclusion, but it only rebuts the second of Neanders claims; the first remains. If she is right about functional classifications being

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of value to biology it must be because of their superior generalitythe fact that they unite disjunctions of cladistic homologues (216). 8.5 A two-level theory of biological traits: The claim that functional classifications are needed for cross-taxa ecological generalisations is not new. He reads old-time progressivist views of evolution as saying much the same thing; different lineages pass through the same series of grades of complexity or adaptedness. But it is easy to break this association between functional classifications and progressivism; parallels between unrelated organisms are attributed to common selection pressures, but, since these pressures dont occur in a fixed order, resemblances (between vertebrate and cephalopod eyes, for example) only mean that the organisms faced the same problems, not that they pass through the same stages. The next change in the environment might produce an ecology that favours the rudimentation of a trait rather than its progression to the next grade (216). Functional classifications can be used to group cladistic units that allows generalisations about evolutionary processes. He likes Hulls notion of evolution as a matter of genealogical actors in ecological roles (217); genealogical actors are taxa in natural historical narratives, while roles are part of an ecological narrative. Thus, and ecological role might be, the top freshwater predator in an environment, which in one setting is played by the crocodile and in another by the anaconda. The ecological role is multiply realised by different phyla (217). These perspectives, though, are not competing but complementary. He thinks there is every reason to believe that there are at least four explanatory levels in biology, each allowing access to a different body of generalisations about evolution (217): 1) population dynamic level (the most abstract), where population genetics and evolutionary game theory, applied to traits characterised solely by their relative fitness functions, provide fundamental dynamic equations about evolutionary processes. This level provides what Sober calls consequence laws, which explain the trait distribution in a poplulation as a result of the relative fitness of the traits present. 2) General ecological level, where traits are classified in relation to their adaptive purpose; they are functional, ecological or adaptive classifications, and provide Sobers source

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laws accounting for the relative fitnesses that plug into 1. They are meant to apply to any organism from any lineage facing a particular kind of adaptive problem, and are consequently still abstract from the point of view of the history of any concrete species. 3) the description generated by 2 are realised in particular cases by actual lineages of organisms, and this level of explanation he dubs the natural historical level. Thus, the flukes of whales, the tails of fish, the feet of seals, and the wings of penguins are different lineages solution to the problem of exerting force on a liquid medium (218). At this level cladistically distinct but functionally identical entities are differentiated, for, although source and consequences laws figure in the natural historical story about particular lineages, so too do particular historical circumstances, which also affect outcomes. 4) The final, and lowest, level of explanation biological traits are differentiated by anatomical and physiological [and biochemical?] characteristics as the various physical manifestation of the traits. At this level cladistic categories are multiply realised by the various ways in which the causal homeostatic mechanism can be set up. PG is ecumenicalthese various levels of explanation complement one another, notwithstanding arguments about the primacy of the cladistic classification (which he too thinks is the maximally predictive form). In fact, he argues, this way of seeing things helps to account for the relative lack of detail and predictive power of functional classifications: describing an adaptive problem tells us very little about the detail of the mechanism that solves the problem (219). But that doesnt matter, since functional classifications add to our understanding of the processes of evolution; they augment rather than supplant cladistic classifications, so who cares if they dont add lots, providing they add something. [Shades of Jackson and Pettit through here?] 8.6 Explanatory levels in biology and psychology: Here he addresses the question of the relationship between the explanatory levels and natural kinds of these two different sciences (for psychology has always acknowledged that the processes it studies can be described at a number of levels). He starts with David Marrs tremendously influential model (see earlier), and then turns to early formulations of functionalism (a la Putnam and Lewis), which only distinguished between the functional and physical levels, with the psychology devoted to

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the first (the computational level, which sets out the role to be played) and the neurosciences to the second (the physical implementation of the computational levelthe structures and processes that occupy the role). The later theory of homuncular functionalism generalises the role/occupant distinction in recognising a hierarchy of systems that constitute a whole series of computational levels. The fundamental insight of functionalism of all varieties is that the full range of true generalisations about psychological systems only emerges from a range investigations pitched at different levels of abstraction, each with its own vocabulary. Sterelny has proposed a similar sort of analysis, but sets up just three levels: an ecological level (the highest, equivalent to Marrs task description), a computational level and an implementation level. Each level is multiply realised by those below it. PG thinks that Sterelnys suggestion--that the level of task description is an ecological one--is important. There is a close connection between task descriptions and those of general ecology, which attempts to say why organisms have mechanisms that accomplish certain ends, but which is not concerned with particular implementations so much as with why one task rather than another is performed, considered only in terms of relative adaptive value. So, natural kinds produced by investigating cognitive systems at the general ecological level will be kinds at the psychological level of task description. Sterelny has also argued that the reverse holdspsychologically significant task descriptions will tend to be descriptions of ecologically meaningful tasks (223). Psychology requires a level of task description (one that ignores the specifics of the computational level) because there are common adaptive problems that organisms of radically different clades have to solve. PG thinks that, when we come to consider the computational level, cladistic kinds will have considerable significance. He concludes that there are three sorts of links between biological and psychological levels: Kinds at the general ecological (functional, adaptive) in biology will be kinds at the ecological level (of task description) in psychology. Kinds at the natural historical level in biology may be either computational level kinds or implementation level kinds in psychology. Kinds at the anatomical level in biology will be kinds at the implementation level in psychology (224).

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8.7 Explanatory levels and conceptual revision: Starts with a summary of his causal homeostasis theoretic claims about intertheoretic identities and conceptual revision: 1) revisions of the extension of concepts will track categories having causal homeostasis, and current theory predicts which categories these will be; 2) revisions of intension will track not only findings about which features a category reliably exhibits but also discoveries about which features must be reliably present, these counterfactual claims stemming from current theories about the categories CH mechanism; 3) phenomenological concepts from different theories may be identified if both refer to a kind marked by roughly the same cluster of features; 4) theoretical concepts from two different theories may be identified if they explain the CH of roughly the same cluster of features using analogous schemes of causal explanation. Turning back to emotion, he says the theory of natural kinds should prescribe how to revise emotion concepts, which is clearly in terms of current science, and it should also tell us which current theoretical concepts are to be identified with older, vernacular concepts. It should tell us, in other words, what emotions really are (225). These prescriptions need not and will not be followed in practice (for all the reasons Hacking points out), but they do say how concepts should evolve if the only aim is increased understanding of the nature of emotions. However, the recognition that the life sciences utilise different explanatory levels, with different natural kinds, creates difficulties with this project. For example, different levels will suggest different ways to revise the extension and intension of fear; the paradigm cases of fear in humans may all be examples of an ecological kind response to danger, but of a computational or neural level kind that is unique to us and/or our close relatives. Which of these two theoretical concepts (if either) should be identified with the concept of fear? (225). Various considerations (225-6) might suggest that the best theoretical concept with which to identify an existing concept is one which can be applied to the range of systems to which people apply the existing concept (226). But there is a problem with this: for example, the neural system associated with pain is homologous in a wide group of vertebrates, and there are good ecological reasons for thinking that there is an

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interesting category of avoidance/wthdrawal responses, common to lots of terrestrial species, and the philosophers robots and Martians. Suppose now that both the neural and the ecological levels have a place in a robust psychology, then how should now talk about pain? The suggestion is that established vernacular usage should be our guide, but it turns out that that itself reveals a non-homogeneous concept: people are unsure whether squids or computers can feel pain. PG thinks his discussion of CH shows that natural kinds vary in the richness of the projectable categories they designate, and that this may furnish a basis for choosing between levels. If two candidate kinds are available, it may be preferable to identify the pretheoretic concept with the kind embedded in the most powerful explanatory enterprise (227) In the next chapter he discusses this in relation to what emotions really are. 9. What emotions really are Lots of good stuff in this chapter, but it doesnt need detailed description since it all follows from the foregoing. Affect programs, higher cognitive emotions and socially constructed emotions are too heterogeneous to be kept together by a serious psychology, for the CH mechanisms underlying them are very different. He acknowledges that they are all experienced as passions rather than actions, which may explain the existence of the general vernacular concept, but that wont do as a basis for science, given the more profound differences between kinds. He concludes, as far as understanding ouselves is concerned the concept of emotion, like the concept of spirituality, can only be a hindrance (247). 10. CodaMood and emotion Here he sketches a theory of moods that might complement his account of emotions. Ill leave it now, though.

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