Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

architectural basis of affect 209
shame, melancholy, and so on—are grouped under this term that
it is dubious that they share anything but a family resemblance.
(Delancey, 2002) 2
The phenomena are even more disparate than that suggests. For instance,
some people would describe an insect as having emotions such as fear, anger,
or being startled, whereas others would deny the possibility. Worse still, when
people disagree as to whether something does or does not have emotions (e.g.,
whether a fetus can suffer), they often disagree on what would count as evidence
to settle the question. For instance, some, but not all, consider that
behavioral responses determine the answer; others require certain neural
mechanisms to have developed; and some say it is merely a matter of degree
and some that it is not a factual matter at all but a matter for ethical decision.
Despite the well-documented conceptual unclarity, many researchers
still assume that the word emotion refers to a generally understood and fairly
precisely defined collection of mechanisms, processes, or states. For them,
whether (some) robots should or could have emotions is a well-defined
question. However, if there really is no clear, well-defined, widely understood
concept, it is not worth attempting to answer the question until we
have achieved more conceptual clarity.
Detailed analysis of pretheoretical concepts (folk psychology) can make
progress using the methods of conceptual analysis explained in Chapter 4
of Sloman (1978), based on Austin (1956). However, that is not our main
purpose.
Arguing about what emotions really are is pointless: “emotion” is a cluster
concept (Sloman, 2002), which has some clear instances (e.g., violent anger),
some clear non-instances (e.g., remembering a mathematical formula), and a
host of indeterminate cases on which agreement cannot easily be reached.
However, something all the various phenomena called emotions seem to have
in common is membership of a more general category of phenomena that are
often called affective, e.g., desires, likes, dislikes, drives, preferences, pleasures,
pains, values, ideals, attitudes, concerns, interests, moods, intentions, etc., the
more enduring of which can be thought of as components of personality, as
suggested by Ortony (2002; see also chapter 7, Ortony et al.).
Mental phenomena that would not be classified as affective include
perceiving, learning, thinking, reasoning, wondering whether, noticing,
remembering, imagining, planning, attending, selecting, acting, changing
one’s mind, stopping or altering an action, and so on. We shall try to clarify
this distinction below.
It may be that many who are interested in emotions are, unwittingly, interested
in the more general phenomena of affect (Ortony, 2002). This would
account for some of the overgeneral applications of the label “emotion.”