Against Emotional Modularity

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (sup1):29-50 (2006)
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Abstract

How many emotions are there? Should we accept as overwhelming the evidence in favour of regarding emotions as emanating from a relatively small number of modules evolved efficiently to serve us in common life situations? Or can emotions, like colour, be organized in a space of two, three, or more dimensions defining a vast number of discriminable emotions, arranged on a continuum, on the model of the colour cone?There is some evidence that certain emotions are specialized to facilitate certain response sequences, relatively encapsulated in their neurophysiological organization. These are natural facts. But nature, as Katherine Hepburn remarked to Humphrey Bogart, is what we were put in the world to rise above. I shall suggest that we can consider the question not merely from a scientific point of view, but from a political point of view. And so I will try to explain how to reconcile the evidence of emotional modularity - which, as some of the contributions to the present volume illustrate, is not devoid of a certain ambiguity - with a reasonable plea for an attitude of disapproval towards the rigidities of our taxonomy.

Other Versions

reprint de Sousa, Ronald (2008) "Against emotional modularity". In Faucher, Luc, Tappolet, Christine, The modularity of emotions, pp. 29-50: University of Calgary Press (2008)

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Author Profiles

Ronnie de Sousa
University of Toronto, St. George Campus
Ronald De Sousa
University of Toronto, St. George Campus

Citations of this work

On How to Develop Emotion Taxonomies.Raamy Majeed - 2024 - Emotion Review 16 (3):139-150.
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