CH. 27 Emotion

Question 1

reductionism

Answer 1

according to reductionism, emotions can be reduced to biological mechanisms and processes. These are usually presumed to include brain processes, but may also include behavioral dispositions and facial expressions. Explanations in terms of cognition, phenomenology, or other psychological vocabulary can ultimately be replaced by explanations in purely biological terms.

Question 2

strong realism

Answer 2

realism about emotions implies that our current folk categories
of emotions exist, and their existence is independent of our categorization of them. Weak realism would deny the latter claim.

Question 3

nominalism

Answer 3

emotions exist but depend in some way on our categorization of them. Each instance of an emotion, say an episode of fear, qualifies as the emotion it is because of how it is classified. Categorization confers identity by
labeling. This is a form of weak realism.

Question 4

social constructionism

Answer 4

emotions exist, but they depend on sociocultural forces.
Categorization and norms play a role in shaping emotions, but once an emotion has been shaped in this way, it can also occur on occasions in which it does not happen to be classified. Categorization confers identity by shaping. This is a form of weak realism.

Question 5

anti-realism

Answer 5

according to anti-realism, our folk categories of emotions do not
refer to any genuine, tangible, or existing items or episodes in the world. Nothing like them has any chance to be scientifically studied or discovered. They are at worst posits in need of wholesale rejection (eliminativism) and at best useful fictions (instrumentalism)

Question 6

revisionism

Answer 6

revisionism implies that our folk categories of emotions do not existas such, but something relatively similar does have scientific validity. Revisionism
says our folk categories will need to be revised, depending on future scientific discoveries about emotions.

Question 7

anti-reductionism

Answer 7

anti-reductionism entails that emotions cannot be reduced to
biological mechanisms. Their identity conditions lie at a different level of analysis,
for example, at the level of cognitive states that do not have fixed correlates in
the brain or body.