The term ur-emotion is proposed to replace basic emotion as a name for the aspects of emotion that underlie perceived similarities of emotion types across cultures and species. The ur- prefix is borrowed from the German on analogy to similar borrowings in textual criticism and musicology. The proposed term ur-emotion is less likely to be interpreted as referring to the entirety of an emotional state than is the term basic emotion. Ur-emotion avoids reductionism by indicating an abstract underlying structure that (...) accounts for similarities between emotions without implying that the differences are unimportant. This article is dedicated to the memory of Bob Solomon, and is framed in terms of his decades-long analysis and critique of the concept of basic emotions. (shrink)

Comparison of human and animal emotions reveals a fuzzy yet discernible boundary. Their undeniable similarities are more aptly described as ur-emotions than as basic emotions. This article describes how the concept of ur-emotion can be useful to animal researchers as well as to social constructionists by making sense of emotional variation both across species and across cultures.

In two studies, we examined how expressions of guilt and shame affected person perception. In the first study, participants read an autobiographical vignette in which the writer did something wrong and reported feeling either guilt, shame, or no emotion. The participants then rated the writer's motivations, beliefs, and traits, as well as their own feelings toward the writer. The person expressing feelings of guilt or shame was perceived more positively on a number of attributes, including moral motivation and social attunement, (...) than the person who reported feeling no emotion. In the second study, the writer of the vignette reported experiencing (or not experiencing) cognitive and motivational aspects of guilt or shame. Expressing a desire to apologise (guilt) or feelings of worthlessness (private shame) resulted in more positive impressions than did reputational concerns (public shame) or a lack of any of these feelings. Our results indicate that verbal expressions of moral emotions such as guilt and shame influence perception of moral character as well as likeability. (shrink)

This reader presents a collection of influential articles on the nature of emotions and ther role in social psychological phenomena, along with recent work that reflects the current state of the art.

This article sets out to replace the concept of basic emotions with the notion of “ur-emotions,” the functionally central underlying processes of action readiness, which are not emotions at all. We propose that what is basic and universal in emotions are not multicomponential syndromes, but states of action readiness, themselves variants of motive states to relate or not relate with the world and with oneself. Unlike emotions, ur-emotions can be held to be universal and biologically based.

Descriptions of emotion incidents were extracted from classic American novels of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Periods. These descriptions were then rated by respondents on scales relevant to attribution of responsibility for emotions. It was found that ratings of the emotion descriptions differed across the three literary periods, with descriptions from the Romantic Period being rated most intense and most appropriate, descriptions from the Victorian Period as least intense, and descriptions from the Modern Period as least appropriate. In addition, it (...) was found that the contemporary American folk theory of attribution of responsibility for emotions might be characterised as being based on perceived intensity of emotions, the social appropriateness of emotions, and the degree to which persons other than the emoter might be said to be responsible for the emoter's emotion. These findings are supportive of a growing appreciation in the emotion literature for culturally and historically relative approaches to emotion research. (shrink)

Descriptions of emotion incidents were extracted from classic American novels of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Periods. These descriptions were then rated by respondents on scales relevant to attribution of responsibility for emotions. It was found that ratings of the emotion descriptions differed across the three literary periods, with descriptions from the Romantic Period being rated most intense and most appropriate, descriptions from the Victorian Period as least intense, and descriptions from the Modern Period as least appropriate. In addition, it (...) was found that the contemporary American folk theory of attribution of responsibility for emotions might be characterised as being based on perceived intensity of emotions, the social appropriateness of emotions, and the degree to which persons other than the emoter might be said to be responsible for the emoter's emotion. These findings are supportive of a growing appreciation in the emotion literature for culturally and historically relative approaches to emotion research. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine cultural influences on shame. In particular, the focus was to assess the influence of the following factors on the object of shame : the effect of individualism/collectivism, measured by a widely used standardized measurement; the role of tightness/looseness ; and the patterns of within- and between-cultural differences and similarities. Data were collected from two American and two Japanese universities to test within- and between-cultural influences on the object of shame. Participants were asked (...) to describe and rate three autobiographical experiences of shame, with each successive request being increasingly specific in asking for shame about something for which the participant did not feel responsible. Cultural differences in tightness and looseness, both within and between the two nations, were predictive of the likelihood that participants would report vicarious shame. In contrast, standard measures of individualism-collectivism did not predict these differences. These findings suggest that culture affects the object of shame. However, in contrast to our hypothesis, attitudinal measures of individualism/collectivism were not a significant predictor. Rather, tightness/looseness determined by ecological factors was the better predictor of some cultural differences on the object of shame. Furthermore, these findings imply that attitudinal measures of individualism/collectivism may not agree with ecological measures, and that including multiple samples from each language/nation effectively reduces the confound between culture and language. (shrink)

We conducted three studies aimed at showing that one-to-one translations between emotion terms might be comparing independent or barely overlapping categories of emotional experience. In Study 1 we found that the speakers' most accessible features of two supposedly equivalent emotions terms (shame and vergüenza) were very different. In Study 2, American and Spanish speakers' typicality ratings of 25 out of 29 constitutive features of “shame” or “vergüenza” were significantly different. In Study 3, these important differences in the content and internal (...) structure of “shame” and “vergüenza” were also reflected in the affective meaning of their corresponding terms. We conclude that “shame” and “vergüenza” do not share the same cluster of central features, and cannot be treated as identical categories of emotional experience. This finding raises serious questions about the one-to-one translation practices not only of most cross-cultural studies on “shame”, but also of other emotion concepts. We suggest an alternative method of translation based on Diachronic Prototype Semantics (Geeraerts, 1997). (shrink)

How do we acquire knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of others? Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original essays that address various questions in philosophy and in empirical cognitive science which arise from our everyday social interaction with other people.

This essay presents a new account of thought insertion. Prevailing views in both philosophy and cognitive science tend to characterize the experience of thought insertion as missing or lacking some element, such as a ‘sense of agency’, found in ordinary first-person awareness of one's own thoughts. By contrast, I propose that, rather than lacking something, experiences of thought insertion have an additional feature not present in ordinary conscious experiences of one's own thoughts. More specifically, I claim that the structure of (...) an experience of thought insertion consists of two distinct elements: a state of ordinary first-person awareness and a sense that this state of awareness is highly unusual. In addition to modeling the experience of thought insertion, I also explain how a delusional pattern of thinking could lead someone who has this kind of experience to adopt a belief that some other entity is inserting thoughts into her mind. Finally, I briefly sketch a neurocomputational framework that could be developed to explain the sense that one's state of first-person awareness is highly irregular. (shrink)

The Capgras delusion is a condition in which a person believes that an imposter has replaced some close friend or relative. Recent theorists have appealed to Bayesianism to help explain both why a subject with the Capgras delusion adopts this delusional belief and why it persists despite counter-evidence. The Bayesian approach is useful for addressing these questions; however, the main proposal of this essay is that Capgras subjects also have a delusional conception of epistemic possibility, more specifically, they think more (...) things are possible, given what is known, than non-delusional subjects do. I argue that this is a central way in which their thinking departs from ordinary cognition and that it cannot be characterized in Bayesian terms. Thus, in order to fully understand the cognitive processing involved in the Capgras delusion, we must move beyond Bayesianism. 1 The Simple Bayesian Model2 Anomalous Evidence and the Capgras Delusion3 Impaired Reasoning4 Setting Priors5 Epistemic Modality6 Delusions of Possibility7 Delusions of Possibility in Different Contexts8 How Many Factors? (shrink)

Ordinarily when someone tells us something about her beliefs, desires or intentions, we presume she is right. According to standard views, this deferential trust is justified on the basis of certain epistemic properties of her assertion. In this paper, I offer a non-epistemic account of deference. I first motivate the account by noting two asymmetries between the kind of deference we show psychological self-ascriptions and the kind we grant to epistemic experts more generally. I then propose a novel agency-based account (...) of deference. Drawing on recent work on self-knowledge, I argue that a person normally has a distinctive type of cognitive agency; specifically she is able to constitute her psychological attitudes by making judgments about what they ought to be. I then argue that a speaker expresses this agentive authority when she self-ascribes a psychological attitude and this is what justifies deferentially trusting what she says. Because the notion of expression plays a central role in this account, I contrast it with recent neo-expressivist theories. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

In both cognitive science and philosophy, many theorists have recently appealed to a predictive processing framework to offer explanations of why certain individuals form delusional beliefs. One aim of this essay will be to illustrate how one could plausibly develop a predictive processing account in different ways to account for the onset of different kinds of delusions. However, the second aim of this essay will be to discuss two significant limitations of the predictive processing framework. First, I shall draw on (...) the structure of explanatory why-questions to argue that predictive processing theories can only partially explain the formation of delusional beliefs. Second, I shall argue that predictive processing theories cannot explain how implausible delusional hypotheses are generated. Yet understanding why an agent even generates a delusional hypothesis is a crucial step to understanding why she eventually comes to believe it. The final section of the essay presents three alternative ways the process of hypothesis generation might be functionally divergent in cases of delusional cognition. (shrink)

According to the perceptual model, our knowledge of others' minds is a form of perceptual knowledge. We know, for example, that Jones is angry because we can literally see that he is. In this essay, I argue that mental states do not have the kind of distinctive looks that could sufficiently justify perceptual knowledge of others’ mentality. I present a puzzle that can arise with respect to mental states that I claim does not arise for non-mental properties like being an (...) apple and argue that this is explained by the fact that the looks of non-mental properties adhere to a certain explanatory principle that does not hold for mental states. This shows, I argue, that, even if we think mental states do have looks, these cannot offer sufficient grounds for perceptual knowledge of others' minds. In the final section of the essay, I suggest an alternative way of thinking about our knowledge of others' minds and about the sorts of looks or appearances that might be associated with mental states. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people perceive patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mentality than the dead. Following on from Gomes and Parrott, we provide evidence to show that participants' responses in the initial experiments are an artifact of the questions posed. Results from two experiments show that, once the questions have been clarified, people do not ascribe more mental capacity to the dead than (...) to PVS patients. There is no reason to think that people perceive PVS patients as more dead than dead. (shrink)

While the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis has attracted many adherents and undergone a number of variations, in general it suffers from an authority problem with two dimensions. First, it is unclear why the analysis of a concept should have objective authority: why explicating what we mean should express how things are. Second, conceptual analysis seems to lack intersubjective authority: why philosophical analysis should apply to more than a parochial group of individuals. I argue that Hegel’s conception of social (...) ontology, focused on his concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), helps to explain how concepts (and their explication) have both objective and intersubjective authority in the social domain. Hegel claims that modern institutions are the product of self-conscious purposes, so that they are conceptually constituted. Concepts do not just represent these objects and so depend on a contingent relation to them. As many contemporary social ontologists agree, this means that our concepts of these institutions are uniquely epistemically “transparent.” They have objective authority. Concepts have intersubjective authority in the modern world as well, according to Hegel. However, I show that this feature of Hegel’s account does not rely on the solution to a philosophical problem. Rather, since the concepts of modern ethical life are “essentially contested,” their content depends on the practical and political agreement of modern subjects. This means that concepts can only have objective authority if some prior intersubjective agreement has been reached. The role of philosophy as conceptual analysis is thus importantly dependent on political developments. (shrink)

In the Treatise, Hume attempts to explain why we all believe that the self is a single unified entity that persists over time, a belief which Hume calls a fiction. In this paper, I demonstrate how Hume uses a type of functional explanation to account for this belief. After explicating Hume's view, I shall argue that it faces two related problems, which constitute a sort of dilemma. In the final section, I show how one of the horns of this dilemma (...) is plausibly what troubles Hume in the famous Appendix passage where he retracts his positive account of personal identity. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold constitutive theories of self-knowledge in the sense that they think either that a person’s psychological states depend upon her having true beliefs about them, or that a person’s believing that she is in a particular psychological state depends upon her actually being in that state. One way to support this type of view can be found in Shoemaker’s well-known argument that an absurd condition, which he calls “self-blindness”, would be possible if a subject’s psychological states and her (...) higher-order beliefs about them were wholly distinct existences. A second reason to endorse a constitutive theory is the widespread conviction that first-person access is epistemically special. In this essay, I shall argue that even if self-blindness is impossible, the best explanation for this does not deny that a person’s psychological states are wholly distinct from her beliefs about them. I shall then attempt to account for the epistemic distinctiveness of first-person access on the basis of fundamental features of rational cognition. One advantage of this account over constitutive theories of self-knowledge is that it is better placed to explain our fallibility and ignorance. (shrink)

It is vital that social workers have a deep and critical understanding of the social work value-base, and are able to analyse and apply values and ethics to their everyday practice. This fully-revised edition of one of our best-selling titles identifies current issues in social work and then applies an ethical dimension. These issues are then investigated further within an anti-discriminatory framework and against the background of the code of practice for social care workers and employers. Traditional value perspectives are (...) clearly explained and current developments in virtue theory and the ethics of care for social work are also introduced. (shrink)

Internalism and externalism disagree about whether agents who are internally the same can differ in their mental states. But what is it for two agents to be internally the same? Standard formulations take agents to be internally the same in virtue of some metaphysical fact, for example, that they share intrinsic physical properties. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that such formulations should be rejected. We provide the outlines of an alternative formulation on which agents are internally the (...) same in virtue of facts about their epistemic capacities. The resulting formulation is one on which internalism and externalism are views about the extent to which an agent’s mental states can vary independently of the capacity for introspective discrimination. We suggest that this epistemic formulation of internalism and externalism picks out a substantive disagreement in philosophical theorizing about the nature of the mind. (shrink)

This masterful work on Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason explores Kant's treatment of the Idea of God, his views concerning evil, and the moral grounds for faith in God. Kant and Religion works to deepen our understanding of religion's place and meaning within the history of human culture, touching on Kant's philosophical stance regarding theoretical, moral, political, and religious matters. Wood's breadth of knowledge of Kant's corpus, philosophical sharpness, and depth of reflection sheds light not only on (...) Kant, but also on the fate of religion and its relation to philosophy in the modern world. (shrink)

De Interpretatione is among Aristotle's most influential and widely read writings; C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system. He shows that De Interpretatione is not a disjointed essay on ill-connected subjects, as traditionally thought, but a highly organized and systematic treatise on logic, argument, and dialectic.

Asperó and Schindler have completely solved the Axiom [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text] problem. They have proved that if [Formula: see text] holds then Axiom [Formula: see text] holds, with no additional assumptions. The key question now concerns the relationship between [Formula: see text] and Axiom [Formula: see text]. This is because the foundational issues raised by the problem of Axiom [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text] arguably persist in the problem of Axiom [Formula: see text] vs. (...) [Formula: see text]. The first of our two main theorems is that Axiom [Formula: see text] is equivalent to Axiom [Formula: see text], and as a corollary we show that Axiom [Formula: see text] fails in all the known models of [Formula: see text]. This suggests that [Formula: see text] actually refutes Axiom [Formula: see text]. Our second main theorem is that the [Formula: see text] Conjecture holds assuming [Formula: see text]. This is the strongest partial result known on this conjecture which is one of the central open problems of [Formula: see text]-theory and [Formula: see text]-logic. These results identify a fundamental asymmetry between the Continuum Hypothesis and any axiom which is both [Formula: see text]-expressible and which implies [Formula: see text], on the basis of generic absoluteness for the simplest of the nontrivial sentences of Third-Order Number Theory. These are the [Formula: see text]-sentences with no parameters. Such sentences are those which simply assert the existence of a set [Formula: see text] for which some property involving only quantification over [Formula: see text] holds. (shrink)