John Anderson on Mind as Feeling

Abstract

The most thoroughgoing of the .20th-century realists, John Anderson denied that minds are made up of cognitive or conative elements. Cognition (knowing) and conation (striving) are things that minds do (relations) and not things that minds are (qualities). He proposed feeling (emotion, passion) as the distinctive quality of the mental. Many of those psychologists who followed Anderson's epistemological realism in their psychology (especially W.M. O'Neil and J.R. Maze) disagreed with the particular thesis of mind as feeling, arguing instead for a version of central state materialism that denies the existence of any distinctively mental properties, and asserts a functional or relational conception of mind. Examination of O'Neil's and Maze's arguments here, together with considerations of experimental psychological research, show that a case can be made for the existence of qualitative emotional states. Such emotional states are positive terms in their own right. They cannot be reduced to particular brain states, as eliminative materialism would claim, nor can they be translated into overtly observable sequences of motor responses, as behaviourism would claim.