Are emotions natural kinds?
When reading the article by Sanfey et. at., I was struck by the significance attached to the fact that the anterior insula is recruited in both physical and moral disgust—the suggestion that the two types of disgust might be conceptually-similar (p 1756). What interests me about this type of claim is the underlying assumption that we can learn a deep truth about a set of human experiences by discovering that they all involve the activation of the same neural structure. It would usually be seen as odd if someone made a similar claim about another part of the body. For example: the fact that our right hand is recruited in the performance of a set of activities would rarely be seen as indicative of any interesting similarity in the set. With the brain, however, there seems to be a temptation to find anatomical boundaries for the concepts we use in self-description. And I wonder whether there is something circular in this type of analysis: beginning with a set of descriptions of human experience that seem similar to us (emotions); determining that some of these experiences involve the same neural structure; discovering that another experience also involves this neural structure; and taking this fact as indicative of an essential similarity between them. Insofar this approach circularly treats emotions as natural kinds, I worry that the work being done in the framing of the analysis is being lost in its results.
mbabazi
February 19, 2008 @ 12:32 am
I also noticed the article’s reference to disgust but had the opposite reaction. I was more surprised that disgust was divided into a moral and physical dimension to begin with. There’s this book called “The Anatomy of Disgust” by William Ian Miller that I’ve wanted to read for years. The author’s thesis is that a well-developed sense of disgust is important to protect you from dangers – basically outsiders and the unknown. Disgust may be simply be the hard-wiring of cultural taboo. In that sense, I can see why the emotional reaction to a physical sensation and immoral behavior would be similar. However, I share your uncertainty on whether the recruitment of similar neural structures tells us a lot about the relationships between different emotions.
David
February 19, 2008 @ 1:46 am
This is a great point. It brings to mind a seminar I took last semester entitled Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Law. The more neuroscientists learn about the brain, the more they realize that what we see as moral or emotional manifestations can be explained in physical terms. It seems, to me at least, that the more and more we learn about the brain the more the distinction between physical and emotional/moral will be shut down. The more we learn that things previously perceived as an expression of emotion can now be explained on a molecular basis, the more we will realize that human nature is not so different from other organisms on Earth.
vhettinger
February 19, 2008 @ 3:31 pm
It’s an interesting question — do we think of emotions as an independent metaphysical concept (like ‘consciousness’ and ‘the soul’) that just happens to have physical correlates (“traces”, if you like), or do we think of emotions as having physical *causes*, and only deriving their seeming metaphysical nature through the limits of a language that developed over centuries of incomplete understanding?
David seems to be favoring the latter, but I understood Jeff’s point to be sort of cautioning against both, and further arguing against drawing unwarranted connections between the ‘concepts’ just because they correlate with similar ‘traces’.