Is Emotion a Natural Kind?

Paul E. Griffiths,
Department of History and Philosophy of Science,
Introduction
In What Emotions Really Are: The problem of psychological categories (Griffiths, 1997) I argued that it is unlikely that all the psychological states and processes that fall under the vernacular category of emotion are sufficiently similar to one another to allow a unified scientific psychology of the emotions. The psychological, neuroscientific and biological theories that best explain any particular subset of human emotions will not adequately explain all human emotions. In a slogan, emotions are not a natural kind (pp. 14-17; 241-247)i. I argued that the same is probably true of many specific emotion categories, such as anger and love (p. 17). On some occasions when a person is properly said to be angry, certain psychological, neuroscientific and biological theories will adequately explain what is happening to that person. On other occasions of anger, however, different theories will be needed. I described my position as eliminitivism about emotion, because it implies that the term ‘emotion’ and some specific emotion terms like
‘anger’ are examples of what philosophers of language have called ‘partial reference’ (p. 242). The term ‘jade’ is the classic example of partial reference. The term ‘jade’ is used as if it referred to a particular kind of mineral, in the same manner as ‘malachite’ or ‘diamond’. In reality, however, the term covers two different stones, jadeite or nephrite. The term ‘jade’ partially refers to each of these two minerals. Hence, for the purposes of geology or chemistry, jade cannot be treated as a single kind of thing. The properties of the two substances have to be investigated separately, their geological origins explained separately and their abundance in unknown geological deposits predicted separately. Likewise, I argued, the sciences of the mind will have to develop separate theories of the
various different kinds of emotion and also of the various different kinds of some particular emotions. In the same sense that there is really no such thing as jade, only jadeite and nephrite, there is no such thing as emotion, only ‘affect programs’, ‘socially sustained pretences’ and other more specific categories of psychological state and process.
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