Becoming Human: The Ontogenesis, Metaphysics, and Expression of Human Emotionality

by Jennifer Greenwood

A novel, wide-ranging, and comprehensive account of how human emotionality develops, proposing a process in which “nature” and “nurture” are integrated. In Becoming Human , Jennifer Greenwood proposes a novel theory of the development of human emotionality. In doing so, she makes important contributions to the nature-nurture debate in emotion theory and the intracranialist–transcranialist debate in philosophy of mind. Greenwood shows that the distinction between nature and nurture is unfounded; biological and cultural resources are deeply functionally integrated throughout the developmental process. She also shows that human emotional and language development are transcranialist achievements; human ontogenesis takes place in extended cognitive systems that include environmental, technological, and sociocultural resources. Greenwood tells the story of how each of us becomes a full human how human brains are constructed and how these brains acquire their contents through massive epigenetic scaffolding. After an introduction in which she explains the efficiency of the human newborn as a learning machine, Greenwood reviews traditional and contemporary theories of emotion, highlighting both strengths and limitations. She addresses the intracranialist–transcranialist debate, arguing that transcranialists have failed to answer important intracranialist objections; describes the depth of the functional integration of intraneural and external resources in emotional ontogenesis; examines early behavior patterns that provide the basis for the development of language; explains the biosemantic theory of representational content, and the wider cognitive systems that define it; and argues that language production and comprehension are always context dependent. Finally, in light of the deep and complex functional integration of neural, corporeal, and sociocultural resources in human ontogenesis, she recommends a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach for future research.

Genres: Philosophy

250 pages, Hardcover

First published December 18, 2015

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greenwood has a fascinating and insightful account of emotions. It seems that the overarching fish that she's out to fry lead her away from noticing the most interesting implications of her account; but this is just from my perspective, where I have different fish than hers which I wanna fry. Let me first summarize her account, and then I'll talk about these larger aims that drive our theorizing.

Greenwood argues that emotion has evolved to serve two natural functions: First, emotion detects what is significant in our environment, in light of our interests and needs, and orchestrates adaptive responses. Second, emotion is expressive and communicative, serving to maintain social relationships. Greenwood argues that the vast majority of accounts of emotion found in both philosophy and psychology are limited. They study only adult human emotions, and are fixated on identifying some essence of these. She proposes, as an alternative, that we study emotion from the angle of its ontogenesis; we should look at how newborn infants emote, and how their capacities of doing so change as they grow older. Integral to this story is the social role that emotions serve, and so the behaviors and capacities of the caretakers surrounding an infant. Emotion will turn out to be key to the explanation of how minimal genetically innate biological constraints can set a human up for learning all the cultural knowledge that humanity has acquired. Linguistic communication is made possible on the back of emotion and emotion regulation,

Infants come with inborn capacities to express their affect through facial expression, gesture, and vocalizations. Their affects are unfocused and indeterminate; there may be a basic affect of distress, for example, which is not yet about anything. A caretaker interprets what the infant is distressed about (e.g., hunger, a wet diaper), and addresses the situation accordingly. Infants also come with an inborn capacity for motor and affective mimicry. When a caretaker does something, or expresses some emotion, the infant will parrot that back. So in mimicking their caretaker, an infant will come to learn what their affects are all about, so their affects become increasingly focused, ultimately becoming emotions that are about particular happenings. This may be thought of as a "scaffolding" process of learning, on par with how a caretaker will hold an infant up to help them walk, until the infant learns to walk on their own.

Greenwood thinks the most primordial situation from which affective learning, emotion, emotion regulation, and ultimately linguistic communication emerge is breastfeeding. There, the infant and caretaker need to take turns, and are attentionally attuned; each of their movements depends upon those of the other, and each must register or sense what the other is doing or about to do, in order to respond properly, as to allow breastfeeding to successfully happen. Emotion regulation is like this; the caretaker senses what the infant or child is upset about, and responds accordingly; and the infant or child will respond to the caretaker's move accordingly. Linguistic communication overtly involves this turn-taking structure.

Greenwood also spends a lot of time summarizing research in the embodied cognitive science tradition, and in arguing for the extended mind thesis, on the basis of her theorizing about emotion. I found this distracting. I got the impression that the desire to defend this thesis strongly shaped what questions Greenwood asked of emotion, and what answers she found. For example, she takes a lot of space to talk about the turn-taking structures of these primitive social activities, and also devotes sections to the cultural influences upon emotion ontogenesis across the chapters. While these details are interesting, I think they could be summed up more quickly, and these details do not get us any further with respect to the more fundamental questions about emotion, such as what function emotion serves, and what the structure of the complex emotion processes that give rise to any emotion episode consist in. Again, it could be that these questions seem more fundamental because I've been thinking about them; but they are also fundamental in the sense that advancements regarding them would change how emotion is conceptualized in the first place, making it possible to formulate new empirical studies, or new interpretations of findings. The sorts of empirical details that Greenwood focuses on cannot advance this.

I also found her treatment of the relationship between emotional "communication" and linguistic communication lacking. It seems that she draws multiple parallels between the two, but then doesn't explain how their underlying psychological processes might be related, or how they may interact in an experiential episode. For example, the two are parallel with respect to having the turn-taking structure; with involving joint attention; with guiding attention to particular objects in the world, and communicating some evaluative assessment of these objects; and with serving the natural function of letting an individual's mind and world be shaped by other people and social norms. But what is the nature of the "meaning" that is "communicated" by emotion? How does it differ from the propositional meaning found in language use? How is it possible for us to use language and top-down regulate our emotions — what must be true of the psychological processes and experiential character of language use in order for it to have this capacity, which is pretty radical, considering that a change in emotion entails change in basic physiological activity? Greenwood doesn't raise these questions, and her arguments and views do not yield implications that could help us address them.

As a whole, reading chapters 1, 2, and 4 are highly informative and relevant for anyone who is interested in emotion, from either a philosophical or a psychological angle. Other chapters are devoted to defending the embodied cognitive science tradition, or to going on about language in a way that doesn't relate them to emotion, and can be skimmed or skipped. Greenwood is onto something important here, and will leave you with meaningful questions.

[Siu Hong · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Read for a seminar in Osnabrueck, Germany)
Greenwood brought in a new perspective on the philosophical study of the emotions and focuses on infants and children's development of emotions and how language, neuroscience and culture play a critical role in that. This premise is perhaps too ambitious for a book with this length and it shows in parts of the book: Although there are plenty of experiments and a wide breadth of philosophical literature that she drawn on, I wish she could better develop her arguments to drive her many implications home. Nevertheless, the book is thought-provoking and has provided many material for discussion in my seminar