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Defending the Validity of Pragmatism in the Classification of Emotion

I critically analyze Kagan’s claim that in order to advance the science of emotion we should abandon the practice of referring to emotions with common folk psychological names, such as fear and anger. Kagan recommends discovering more homogenous constructs that are segregated by the type of evidence used to infer those constructs. He also argues that variable origins, biological implementations, and psychological and sociocultural contexts may combine to create distinct kinds of emotional states that require distinct names. I acknowledge that such a splitting strategy will provide increased validity, but also claim that atomizing alone may not give us everything we want from a scientific classification.