Is Emotion a Natural Kind?

Griffiths, Paul (2002) Is Emotion a Natural Kind?.

Abstract

In <i>What Emotions Really Are: The problem of psychological categories<i> 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. In this paper I restate what I mean by ‘natural kind’ and my argument for supposing that emotion is not a natural kind in this specific sense. In the following sections I discuss the two most promising proposals to reunify the emotion category: the revival of the Jamesian theory of emotion associated with the writings of Antonio Damasio and a philosophical approach to the content of emotional representations that draws on ‘multi-level appraisal theory’ in psychology.