The Odd Couple: The Compatibility of Social Construction and Evolutionary Psychology

This chapter focuses on the dispute between evolutionary psychology and social constructionist approaches to the emotions. The emotions are a crucial case, both because they play a central role in discussions of other social and psychological phenomena. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a brief overview of the social constructionist approach. Section 3 reviews work on emotions in the evolutionary psychology tradition and sets out a model of the psychological mechanisms. Section 4 answers yes to the question of whether social constructionists and evolutionary psychologists have anything left to disagree about. Section 5 discusses how social constructionists and evolutionary psychologists have a deep though largely hidden philosophical disagreement about the meaning and the reference of the emotion terms that ordinary folk use, words like "anger," "fear," and "song." Section 6, begins by asking which account of the meaning and reference of emotion terms is correct, and goes on to suggest that no one really knows and that the question itself may not be clear enough to have a determinate answer. It also argues that it really doesn't matter which side is right since it is easy to see how this dispute can be bracketed and set aside.