“Emotion”: One Word,Many Concepts

It is a privilege to see my work subjected to careful critical commentary by a panel of such distinguished scholars. I am not only grateful for this opportunity, but also heartened by the level of agreement that emerges. There is substantial, albeit not unanimous, support, from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, as well as from my own field of history, for the view that the English-language term “emotion” does not name either a natural kind or a coherent psychological category. It is, perhaps, the philosophers who seem to remain most wedded to “emotion.”

LeDoux (2012) concludes that the term “emotion,” if it is to be preserved at all in neuroscience, will not be applied to everyday mental states such as fear, joy, or anger, but to deeper- lying functions such as defense, reproduction, or homeostasis. This is an intriguing proposition. It draws attention again to the divergence between technical and everyday uses of psychological terms. It is unlikely that in everyday usage English speakers will stop referring to fear, joy, and anger as “emotions.” This disjunction between everyday and scientific languages and concepts is nicely brought out by Majid (2012) too. I agree entirely that psychologists should beware of “an overreliance on the English language as a transparent window into emotion categories,” (2012, p. 380), especially if they are supposed to be universal. Wassmann’s (2012) comments about the meanings of German terms such as Affekt and Gefühl confirm the necessity of attending to different categorizations and semantic nuances in non-English languages.

Shweder (2012) makes a direct request for further information about the response of Augustine and Aquinas to the Stoics, and about how the Stoics might have responded in their turn (a fuller account can be found in Dixon, 2003, pp. 23–61). The claim made by Christian critics that the Stoic ideal of apatheia was inhuman, was both normative and descriptive. In other words, they thought it inappropriate to aim for such an unfeeling state, and also impossible to achieve it (in this life). Augustine was sure that a Stoic on a storm-tossed ship would tremble with fear just as much as an Aristotelian. The Stoic response to such criticism could have included reference to the idea of eupatheiai, or “good feelings,” which were the more gentle and virtuous affections permitted to the Stoic sage even when he had freed himself from the more violent and troubling passions, those diseases of the soul. Again we find ourselves needing to make distinctions not available to the theorist committed to an overarching category of the “emotions.”

This brings me finally to offer a brief point of clarification in response to Deigh’s (2012) commentary. Deigh combines extremely insightful readings of Hume and James with a misreading of my own article (on the question of the relationship of Thomas Brown’s theory of emotions to what went before and what came after, see Dixon, 2003, 2010). I agree entirely with Deigh that words and concepts are different things (Dixon 2008, pp. 33–40, spells this out in some detail). My original article (2012) explicitly set out to show how the word “emotion” has been used to name many different concepts, both before and after its adoption as a major psychological category. As I put it in that article: “looking at the multiple concepts that have been named by the single term ‘emotion,’ we can ask what theorists have intended to claim about a mental or bodily state by calling it an ‘emotion’” (2012, p. 339).