I am grateful to the editor of Psychological Inquiry for the opportunity to read and reflect on Professor Agnes Moors’s (this issue) fascinating target article, which offers an extremely helpful analysis of existing theories of emotion, as well as some bold proposals for a new approach. I am not qualified to comment on the empirical and theoretical merits of Moors’s arguments from the point of view of contemporary psychology. Instead I offer here some thoughts inspired by reading Moors’s article, from my perspective as a historian of emotions and philosophy. The history of emotions, as a field, tends toward an appreciation of the cultural specificity and diversity rather than the universality of human emotional life (Frevert, 2011; Plamper, 2015; Watt Smith, 2015). As such, it is common to find that historians of emotions are more sympathetic to constructionist accounts of human emotions and sceptical of the claims of “basic emotion” and “affect program” theories (Leys, 2010). In what follows I comment first on Moors’s thoughts about psychological categories, then on the rationality or otherwise of emotional behaviors, before ending with some thoughts about whether the composition of an emotional episode is more like a physical aggregate or a chemical compound. In my previous work I have suggested that the Scottish philosopher, physician, and poet Professor Thomas Brown (1778– 1820) was the inventor of “the emotions” as a systematic psychological category. In his widely read Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, originally delivered to students in Edinburgh and subsequently published in 1820, Brown (2010) noted, “The exact meaning of the term emotion, it is difficult to state in any form of words” (pp. 145). He went on, “Perhaps, if any definition of them be possible, they may be defined to be vivid feelings, arising immediately from the consideration of objects, perceived, or remembered, or imagined, or from other prior emotions” (Brown, 2010, pp. 145–146). As we approach the bicentenary of the publication of Brown’s lectures, perhaps it is finally time for psychology to give up on Brown’s aspiration to provide a coherent theoretical account of those vivid but ill-defined feelings known as “the emotions.” Agnes Moors’s article certainly seems to imply as much. Moors suggests that not only “emotion” and “the emotions” but also all “vernacular emotion subsets,” that is, particular emotion words like “anger,” “fear,” or “surprise,” fail the tests of similarity and fruitfulness, which mark out genuinely useful scientific categories. For Moors, in other words, a satisfactory theory of the emotions cannot be found, because “the emotions” do not exist as a coherent psychological domain, or “scientific set.” As far as I understand her argument, Moors wants to suggest, in agreement with psychological construction theory, that an emotional episode becomes an emotional episode only when the person experiencing it labels it as such. It is labeling, and not any underlying biological or psychological structure, that qualifies an episode for inclusion in the category of “emotion.” Moors, then, has theoretical psychological reasons, and views about scientific explanation, that lead her to argue that “emotion” or “the emotions” are unsatisfactory psychological categories. There are other reasons to make similar arguments. I have done so myself, for instance, on the basis of intellectual history (Dixon, 2003, 2012). There is a difference between “emotion” and “the emotions” as historical psychological terms. “Emotion” in the singular can function like “feeling” or “affect” as a general abstraction for a mode of agitated felt experience, and in fact it has been used this way since the 18th century. “The emotions,” on the other hand, appeared as a discrete psychological category only in the mid-19th century, aiming to bring together states including love, hatred, joy, sadness, fear, anger, and so on, under a unifying theoretical umbrella. Moors could draw upon research in both linguistics and history for further support for the idea that the categorization of experiences using the language of “emotion” is a feature of post-1850 English-language psychology (both vernacular and scientific), which does not map directly onto the categories of other times, languages, and cultures (Frevert et al., 2014; Wassmann, 2016; Wierzbicka, 1999, 2010). I lack the disciplinary expertise to appreciate the significance of some other linguistic distinctions that Moors sets out to make but, on the face of it, I could not see why she considered “perception,” “appraisal,” and “categorization” unhelpful, and interchangeable, terms while her favored alternative language of “input” and “output,” “content,” “representation,” and “extraction mechanisms” were supposed to be more objective, neutral, and scientific. All of these terms, both those Moors rejects and those she adopts, seem comparably neutral and formal or, to look at it from the opposite direction, equally open to skeptical deconstruction as unstable fictions by those inclined to doubt their value. I can imagine a critic of Moors’s approach to “emotion” similarly asking whether her favored categories of “behavior” and “experience” are ultimately more coherent and robust than “emotion” as scientific categories.

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标签、理性和心灵的化学：历史背景下的摩尔人

感谢 Psychological Inquiry 的编辑有机会阅读和反思 Agnes Moors 教授（本期）引人入胜的目标文章，该文章对现有的情绪理论进行了非常有用的分析，并提出了一些新方法的大胆建议. 我没有资格从当代心理学的角度评论摩尔论点的经验和理论价值。相反，从我作为情感和哲学历史学家的角度来看，我在这里提供了一些受到阅读摩尔文章启发的想法。情感史作为一个领域，倾向于欣赏文化的特殊性和多样性，而不是人类情感生活的普遍性（Frevert，2011；Plamper，2015；Watt Smith，2015）。因此，通常会发现，情感历史学家更同情人类情感的建构主义解释，并对“基本情感”和“影响程序”理论的主张持怀疑态度（Leys，2010）。在接下来的内容中，我首先评论摩尔关于心理类别的想法，然后评论情绪行为的合理性或其他方面，然后再讨论情绪事件的组成更像是物理集合还是化合物。在我之前的工作中，我曾建议苏格兰哲学家、医生和诗人托马斯·布朗教授（1778-1820）是作为系统心理学类别的“情绪”的发明者。在他广为流传的《人类心灵哲学讲座》中，最初是在爱丁堡教授给学生的，随后于 1820 年出版，Brown (2010) 指出，“情绪这个词的确切含义，很难用任何形式的语言来表述”（第 145 页）。他继续说道，“也许，如果对它们有任何定义，它们可能会被定义为生动的感​​觉，从对物体的考虑、感知、记忆、想象或其他先前的情绪中立即产生”（布朗，2010 年） ，第 145-146 页）。当我们接近布朗讲座发表 200 周年之际，也许是时候让心理学最终放弃布朗的愿望，即为那些被称为“情绪”的生动但不明确的感觉提供连贯的理论解释。Agnes Moors 的文章似乎也暗示了这一点。Moors 建议不仅是“情绪”和“情绪”，还有所有“白话情绪子集”，即特定的情绪词，如“愤怒”、“恐惧”或“惊讶”，”未能通过相似性和成果性的测试，这些测试标出了真正有用的科学类别。换句话说，对于摩尔人来说，无法找到令人满意的情绪理论，因为“情绪”并不作为一个连贯的心理领域或“科学集合”而存在。就我对她的论点的理解，摩尔想建议，与心理建构理论一致，只有当经历它的人将其标记为情绪发作时，情绪发作才会成为情绪发作。是标签，而不是任何潜在的生物或心理结构，才有资格将一集包含在“情感”类别中。因此，摩尔有理论心理原因和科学解释的观点，这导致她认为“情绪”或“情绪”是不令人满意的心理类别。提出类似论点还有其他原因。例如，我自己根据思想史（Dixon，2003，2012）这样做了。作为历史心理学术语，“情绪”和“情绪”之间存在差异。单数形式的“情感”可以像“感觉”或“影响”一样发挥作用，作为一种激动的感觉体验模式的一般抽象，实际上自 18 世纪以来它一直以这种方式使用。而“情绪”则是在 19 世纪中叶才作为一个离散的心理范畴出现的，旨在将爱、恨、喜悦、悲伤、恐惧、愤怒等状态在一个统一的理论下汇集起来。伞。摩尔人可以借鉴语言学和历史方面的研究，进一步支持这样一种观点，即使用“情感”语言对体验进行分类是 1850 年后英语心理学（白话和科学）的一个特征，它没有映射直接进入其他时代、语言和文化的类别（Frevert 等人，2014 年；Wassmann，2016 年；Wierzbicka，1999 年，2010 年）。我缺乏学科专业知识来理解摩尔人着手进行的其他一些语言区别的重要性，但从表面上看，我不明白为什么她认为“感知”、“评估”和“分类”没有帮助，并且可互换的术语，虽然她更喜欢“输入”和“输出”的替代语言，但“内容”、“表示”和“提取机制”应该更客观、中立，和科学。所有这些术语，无论是摩尔人拒绝的还是她采用的，似乎都比较中立和正式，或者从相反的方向看，同样容易受到怀疑解构的怀疑，就像那些倾向于怀疑其价值的不稳定小说一样。我可以想象一位批评摩尔对“情感”的处理方法的批评者同样会问她喜欢的“行为”和“体验”类别是否最终比作为科学类别的“情感”更加连贯和稳健。