講演者:Philip Gerrans(University of Adelaide)
日時:11月9日(月)18:00〜19:30
場所:京都大学文学部校舎1F会議室
言語:英語
Title : A PROCESSING ACCOUNT OF EMOTION
Absutract : Planning and decision making, social and moral cognition, reasoning, cognitive development and self-representation depend on emotional processes. Psychologists and neuroscientists in these fields draw on philosophical theories of emotion to inter pret their results while, at the same time, the philosophy of emotion is now deeply intertwined with empirical work on emoti ons, ranging from molecular to psychological levels. Yet there is no established theoretical consensus about the nature of e motional processing and the relationship between emotions (and affective experience) and cognition.
This paper attempts theoretical unification via a method advocated by Dominic Murphy “we arrive at a comprehensive set of positive facts about how the mind works, and then ask which of its products and breakdowns matter for our various projects” . The approach is similar to the way in which philosophical theories of human motivation and the cognitive science of reward processing have mutually informed each other. I explain some specific puzzles about the nature of emotional phenomena: Depe rsonalisation Disorder, delays in effects of anti-depressant treatment on mood, Social Anxiety Disorder. I also explain how the processing account deals with general questions about the relationship between phenomenology and intentionality of emot ional experience that motivate theoretical disagreement.
The main competitors in the theory of emotion: Darwinian, Somatic, Feeling and Representational have all focused on a real and important aspect of emotion. Emotions are adaptations, they have bodily consequences and modes of expression, their fel t aspect is essential to their role in human life, and they depend essentially on representational processes. Precisely how these aspects interact and which are causally primary in episodes of emotion cannot be understood in the absence of a proces sing account. Or so I claim!