Different Research Programs on Emotion 285Emotions existed long before culture or language. At best,
language can provide labels for different emotions. Of course,
different languages provide different labels, but these point to
the same preexisting reality: Just aslunaandmoonare differ-
ent labels for the same entity, so areanger, ningaq,andliget
just different labels for the same entity. Language is useful
only in providing labels, and most talk about emotion is of lit-
tle interest to the scientist and can often obscure or conceal
reality behind the words, as in romantic or metaphoric talk
about the moon.
Nominalism
Nominalism is thought by some to have started with the me-
dieval philosopher Ockham, who broke with many of the
philosophical assumptions of his contemporaries. Ockham
taught that there exist only individual events and things (such
as Briggs’s reaction that day to the Kapluna fishermen). Indi-
vidual events or things (even those called by the same name)
do not share with each other some Platonic essence. Names
for general classes of events or things (e.g., emotionoranger)
are therefore misleading. Sometimes some events look simi-
lar enough for an observer to group them together and give
them a common name—hence nominalism. Through lan-
guage, people can name general groups of these individual
events and talk about the type in general. Nevertheless, such
groupings are always arbitrary, in the sense that the only
thing real is the individual. A nominalist position is thus
skeptical about any claims about reality outside individual
events and words themselves.
In a modern version of nominalism, the emphasis is on the
role of words. Words differ from one society to the next or
one historical era to the next, and that is the reality to be ana-
lyzed. As words, anger, liget, andningaqare important in
their own right, rather than as labels for a common entity
(Harre, 1986). An extreme version of this approach asserts
that these words lack any denotation. Instead, they are simply
cultural practices (e.g., Lutz, 1988). Another version would
be the belief that there do exist individual events, but these
individual events take on the meaning of anger, liget,or
ningaqonly by being labeled. For example, one approach to
emotion words is to study them only as part of discourse and
focus on pragmatics of their use. (What is the consequence,
in Utku society, of accusing someone of being ningaq?)
Emotion words, as part of discourse, create an object (the
emotion) that exists only in the context of the speaker’s
construed social reality: Words create a cultural, idiosyn-
cratic illusion that is the emotion itself. Anger, liget, and
ningaqare therefore not comparable and cannot be under-
stood outside the culture in which they fulfill an important
role in the regulation of everyday interaction. From this
point of view, much of the psychology of emotion is the im-
position of a Western construction on other cultures, which
ignores the implicit symbolic structure that gives shape and
meaning to each potential candidate for the label emotionin
that culture (Shweder & Haidt, 2000).ConceptualismA conceptualist position shares with ontological realism its
assumption that emotion words refer to a nonlinguistic real-
ity, its interest in that reality rather than in words, and its skep-
ticism about the ability of language to reveal that reality. The
conceptualist, however, takes such words asangerandliget
as concepts rather than as labels for entities. There are many
ways to construe reality. Thus, any inference to emotions as
independent, real entities, while possible, is suspect. The na-
ture of the reality so conceptualized is the focal question. For
example, one might hold that when people use an emotion
word, they are pointing to a physiological, behavioral, or sit-
uational event—something observable—and not to any emo-
tional entity. The scientist’s job is to search for an objective
account of the actual processes commonly conceptualized as
anger, liget,orningaq. Behaviorist, functionalist, and situa-
tionist approaches to emotion arise from this philosophical
background.FormalismThe formal approach treats emotion words as formal objects,
much like numbers or logical operators. As in the nominalist
approach, the focus is again on language, although in this
case it is on the semantics rather than pragmatics of language.
Emotionandemociónare first and foremost words. What are
the necessary and sufficient features foremotionandemo-
ción?Or for anger, liget,orningaq?These terms may have
both common and distinguishing features, which would re-
veal universal and language-specific aspects of these words,
respectively. Rather than simply assume that angerliget
ningaq,the researcher seeks to provide a formal analysis of
each word. Words are linguistic phenomena, parts of a partic-
ular language. Each specific language is a cultural product,
but language in general has universal aspects.DIFFERENT RESEARCH PROGRAMS
ON EMOTIONThe study of emotion is guided by deep assumptions that res-
onate with old philosophical debates. The result is that differ-
ent and apparently incompatible research programs have