What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Science and Its... by Paul E. Griffiths

What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Science and Its...

Features

Cover Type: Paperback with 293 pages

Published by: University Of Chicago Press August 12, 1998

Written in: English

ISBN 10 Number: 0226308723

ISBN 13 Number: 978-0226308722

Book Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches

Weighs: 14.4 ounces

From Library Journal
Griffiths (philosophy, Otago Univ., New Zealand) has written a work of depth and clarity in an area of murky ambiguity, producing a much-needed standard at the border of science, philosophy, and psychology. Essentially, he argues that our concept of emotions, grounded in modern psychology, encompasses and thereby conflates utterly different human responses. As he presents his case, offering a forthright critique of past and present theories, Griffiths touches on such issues as evolution, social construction, natural kinds (categories corresponding with real distinctions in nature), cognition, and moods. While addressing specialists, the book will reward general readers who apply themselves to its remarkably accessible style. For academic and large public libraries.?E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description
In this provocative contribution to the philosophy of science and mind, Paul E. Griffiths criticizes contemporary philosophy and psychology of emotion for failing to take in an evolutionary perspective and address current work in neurobiology and cognitive science. Reviewing the three current models of emotion, Griffiths points out their deficiencies and constructs a basis for future models that pay equal attention to biological fact and conceptual rigor.

"Griffiths has written a work of depth and clarity in an area of murky ambiguity, producing a much-needed standard at the border of science, philosophy, and psychology. . . . As he presents his case, offering a forthright critique of past and present theories, Griffiths touches on such issues as evolution, social construction, natural kinds (categories corresponding with real distinctions in nature), cognition, and moods. While addressing specialists, the book will reward general readers who apply themselves to its remarkably accessible style."—Library Journal

"What Emotions Really Are makes a strong claim to be one of the best books to have emerged on the subject of human emotion."—Ray Dolan, Nature

Reader Reviews
Like so many modern philosophy books, *What Emotions Really Are* is not so much a systematic treatise as a loosely integrated collection of articles with its occasional gaps and redundancies - in the image of the ugly collage on the cover. It is divided into two parts : Ť Emotion ť and Ť The Nature of Psychological Categories ť, the second of which contains a fifty-page digression on Ť natural kinds ť with only a thin theoretical connection to the main topic of the book. Griffiths does a good job reviewing the major modern theories of emotion and showing how the least defective of them do explain some of what folk psychology means by Ť emotion ť. But his main thesis is that the latter category has to be rejected because it does not Ť carve nature at the joints ť and actually covers a very heterogeneous collection of psychological phenomena. Griffiths proposes to replace it with several distinct categories like Ť affect programs ť, basic, stereotyped, transcultural and even transspecific responses ; more complex emotions that vary across cultures ; Ť socially sustained pretenses ť based on some form of self-deception ; and Ť moods ť, a concept he parachutes in the last chapter. The book contains a few interesting remarks on the nature / nurture dichotomy, explaining how even genetically encoded behaviour is not immune to environmental influences. The more epistemological chapters, however, are typical of modern philosophy in their embarrassment with reality, their vacuous neologisms and their wonderfully droll verbal contorsions (Ť My concept of cat is about cats because its existence depends on cats by the particular kind of causal pathway appropriate to being about ť). A particularly funny by-product of the absurdities blurted forward by modern philosophers is that commonsense gets to be Ť discovered ť by even hipper philosophers who refer to it with such obscure jargon that you might not even recognize grandpa's down-to-earth wisdom. For instance, Ť Boyd 1991 ť originated the principle of the Ť metaphysical innocence of theory construction ť, which tells us among other things that Ť the decision to classify certain events fifty years ago as child abuse has no effect on those events because no natural causal mechanism can reach them from the present. ť My favorite new concept is that of Ť causal homeostasis ť, which Griffiths introduces in an attempt to get rid of reality in his account of natural kinds. A category is said to have causal homeostasis if the correlations it identifies among its referents have Ť some underlying explanation that makes [the category] projectable ť, i.e. if the Ť theoretical significance ť of these correlations is such that they can be extrapolated to Ť unobserved instances ť. Apart from the jargon, this is not altogether silly. However, Griffiths uses it to give the concept of essence a Ť less metaphysical ť (i.e. less reality-oriented) definition as Ť any theoretical structure that accounts for the projectability of a category ť... As a review of the psychological theories currently in vogue, this book can serve as a starting point for an exploration of these theories, if you really have to. But this is the most I can say for it. Comment | | (Report this)

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Updated on 6-4-2008.