Becoming Human, based upon the author’s doctoral dissertation, is the fifteenth monograph in a series devoted to philosophical issues in biology and psychology. Its goals are clearly announced from the very beginning and in the conclusion (e.g. 2 & 205). Firstly, it aims to dissolve the nature-nurture dichotomy nestled within recent theories of the emotions by contending that biological and cultural resources are fundamentally integrated throughout all phases of human development. Secondly, it aims to demonstrate that both emotional and linguistic development operates beyond the individual, whose evolving neuro-physiological nature continually interacts with and is transformed by the extended domains of environmental, socio-cultural, and technological contexts.

          Jennifer Greenwood’s eight-chapter volume, for all its many summaries of “how human brains are constructed and how these brains acquire their contents through massive epigenetic scaffolding” (xi), seems to be mainly pitched at fellow researchers who, she hopes, will form a “multidisciplinary readership” (2). However, for readers entering the field, the monograph, despite its attempt to present its sequence of chapters as “digestible…chunks” (10), might prove quite demanding. Greenwood’s explications of recent hypotheses and dismissal of rival accounts when unanchored by examples and her penchant for abstract generalizations, neologisms, and acronyms potentially diminish the immediate readability of the text. Nonetheless, Becoming Human, although avoiding pathological instances, does raise a number of significant issues. Hence, after briefly surveying the introductory set of Greenwood’s key theoretical claims portraying the newly born as “a highly efficient learning machine” (xii), we shall, within the limits upon length, examine two of her major initiating conceptions of emotion and language more closely: the first regarding her appeal to preadaptation and the second, interest as a basic emotion.

 

                                                            I

 

Quoting liberally, let us briefly sketch how Greenwood constantly interweaves the biological and cultural factors in human development. She fundamentally contends that social and physical “complementary repertoires of constraints” constitute the basis for the concurrent “development of human emotionality and language (and, by implication, symbolic thought)” (206). This joint development depends upon the “linguistically mediated social relationship” between parent and child (6), a development manifested by the scaffolded transition from an inter-personal to an intra-personal regulation of emotions. The parental scaffolding involved has “preadapted” “dispositions and skills,” themselves “the results of an evolutionary process of natural selection,” enabling anyone in the parental role to interpret the child’s behavior (3). Alternatively expressed, parental “search-identify-correct” reactions are “triggered” by the infant within a “continuous interaction of constraints that constructs the context” in which both parties “progressively (continuously) develop” (4-5).

Emotional development, she claims, can be traced from “inborn emotional precursors”—or “affect expressions” such as “unfocused crying” and bodily “unrest” (3)—to “basic emotions and thence to…cognitive emotions” forming an originally natural rather than a socio-culturally constructed class in which “precursor emotions are basic” (212). Emotions are characterized as “evolved capacities” (21 & 23), the extent of which varies in “number and complexity” when comparing adult and child because the child begins with a “limited range of patterns of bodily perturbation” (23). According to Greenwood, emotions are “essentially ostensive-expressive, that is, communicative devices that evolved to regulate…human…social life” initially through inter-personal regulation before doing so intra-personally (23). How does she define the basic emotions characterising the above? They are those that “markedly outlast precipitating…conditions,” that are “governed” by intermediately located “neural circuits,” and that “are conceptualized as sensorimotor command circuits” (24). Which emotions does Greenwood include as basic? Adapting Paul Ekman’s influential hypothesis, she nominates six: affection, anger, fear, interest, joy, and sadness. By contrast, “higher cognitive emotions,” involving “emotional-affective processes” (26) and presupposing language and a “conceptual grasp of self” (27), are said to include contempt, empathy, envy, guilt, humour, jealousy, and shame.

For Greenwood, language, whilst shaping emotional growth, develops concurrently where, for example:

Increasing referential clarity is acquired in both basic emotions and higher

cognitive emotions with the assistance of language…[through] the

development of gesture, pragmatic foundation, and, finally, semantic language devices (7). 

Later, however, language development is re-described as a dual phase comprising a “pragmatic foundation” and then a “lexicon” (111). The “devices” underpinning language, Greenwood continues, are

reflected in the development of the neural substrata on which this continuum of ostensive-expressive devices partly supervenes. Each stage on the continuum represents a move away from fixed to highly flexible responses to salience (or relevance) detectors (7).

At the same time, Greenwood distinguishes shifts in the nature of parental scaffolding from an adult-centred “unidirectional” kind seen, for example, when helping an infant to walk towards an interactional or jointly engaged kind where speech begins to emerge (8). Language, being “irredeemably context sensitive” (8), is categorized under the broad banner of (human) communication which is said to be “essentially inferential” and where linguistic codes or conventions provide “evidence of meaning” rather than acting as the primary way language is processed (7). Once the “neural circuits have been sufficiently maturated” (9), the newly born’s “few biological preadaptations” (8) are said to be ideally suited for learning through the interplay of genetic and epigenetic, social and environmental factors.

So far, we have briefly sampled Greenwood’s opening before she recruits Paul Griffiths, Horst Hendriks-Jansen, Manfred Holodynski, Hanuš and Mechthild Papoušek, and Ruth Millikan amongst others into her more technical concerns in ensuing chapters. Instead of summarising these, the second part of this review will focus upon a couple of questions readers might well raise before her tightly organized advocacy of “reciprocal world-to-mind extension” or, as she prefers to term it, “contingent transcranialism” (10) commences.

 

II

 

In the space remaining, let us consider two fundamental conceptual issues raised by Greenwood’s initial theoretical positioning highlighted above. Firstly, she has no hesitation repeatedly upholding the preadapted status of human emotions and language. However, are we to presume that she simply assents to what Charles Darwin in “On the Origins and Transitions of Organic Beings with Peculiar Habits and Structure” in his Origin of the Species (1859, Ch. 6.3, pp. 179-186) first countenanced? In brief, the function of a biological trait might shift during its evolutionary history, popularly illustrated, as school children often recite, by the large feathers of birds initially functioning as a means of maintaining bodily warmth, then as a means of collecting insects, and finally as a means of gliding.

Yet no discussion by Greenwood is found of how preadaptation, owing to its teleological connotations, has gradually come to be replaced by exaptation. As Stephen Gould and Elizabeth Vrba first argued in the early ‘eighties, exaptation covers cases both where a naturally evolved function is co-opted for a new use and where a non-adapted trait is co-opted for a current use. More pertinently, exaptation has recently been applied to the evolution of human language. For instance, Rudolf Botha, in the July 2011 issue of Lingua, questions whether exaptation actually applies to such hypotheses as social categories of agents, actions, and aims being syntactically co-opted into utterances or the manipulation of objects being precursorily converted into the recursive dimension of language, and so forth. Following Botha, we may ask of Greenwood: To what extent are both cases of exaptation being conflated? Is exaptation being applied to language in its entirety or not and why? Finally, can the hypothesis proposed actually be tested or does it remains purely speculative?

          Secondly, Greenwood includes interest amongst six basic, physiologically manifested emotions (as against its institutional sense, be it political or commercial). What does she mean by “interest”? At first, she correlates five (not six as above) “precursor emotions that evolved to deal with experiential saliences in ancestral environments,” ranging from fear with danger to distress with challenges (83). Interest, here, is matched with novelty. Greenwood later elaborates her correlative conception of precursor emotions in terms of maturational phases. The first phase to the age of twenty-four months sees the infant building “a differentiated and culturally specific repertoire of emotions from the affect expressions with which they are…universally endowed” along with “a repertoire of coping actions all within the framework of interpersonal regulation with caregivers” (84). During this phase, “affect expressions,” which are defined as “the referents of…English words” such as “interest,” are “triggered solely by…stimulus thresholds; they are not directed at particular objects” (85). More particularly, Greenwood asserts, “interest” serves the function of helping “to build representations of the external and internal physical and phenomenological environment” and, together with “endogenous pleasure,” is one of “only” two “precursor strategies for regulating emotion” possessed by the newly born (85). Subsequently, we are told, in a passage given to detailing forms of intuitive parenting:

Interest and focused attention are triggered by novelty of external stimulation, and novelty is tied to certain temporal, sensory, and spatial contingencies…. Neonates do not simply respond to such contingencies [e.g., the shapes of the parental face and the sounds of speech], …they also actively search for them… When interest is stimulated, the baby ceases unfocused motor activity, orients toward, and visually fixates the stimulus object… (87).

Whilst the preceding account may not dissuade readers, the question of what “interest” means remains.

          Conceptually, having an interest and taking an interest are markedly different. Even as children in the first developmental phase, we can have an interest in someone or something without at a given time being prone to take or feel that interest. Alternatively cast, we distinguish between a dispositional sense of interest and an occurrent or episodic sense. Indeed, it is completely feasible that a young child can be repeatedly said by its parents to have been interested in, say, woollen socks without feeling an interest in them. Nor can we, as Greenwood comes close to doing above, identify interest with “(focused) attention.” Dispositionally, a child can have an interest which need not be activated at every moment unlike attention which is paid or held at every moment. Occurrently, although a child taking an interest in something at a given moment must be paying attention to it, the inverse does not hold. The child can pay attention to something without ever taking or having an interest in it.

          Does Greenwood classify interest as one of the basic emotions because she implicitly construes interest as a form of attention accompanied by feeling? If so, in which sense can an infant “feel” interested (of the several senses first examined by Gilbert Ryle’s “Feelings” in the April 1951 issue of The Philosophical Quarterly)? To begin, feeling interested does not appear to be perceptually tactile such as feeling, or feeling for, a hole in woollen socks. Nor does feeling interested necessarily have any accompanying sensations; indeed, any accompanying sensation experienced—say, persistent itchiness—may well distract the child from its object of interest. Next, joy and sadness—two of Greenwood’s basic set—are moods that are commonly conceived as emotions, but interest is not a mood. Unlike a sad or joyful mood, interest has an object; unlike a mood, interest does not pervade our actions and feelings; and, unlike an interest, a mood does not as such supply a motive for action. Whereas we can describe the extent of a mood as all-embracing or complete, interest tends to be qualitatively appraised as, say, acute or intense. Again, feeling interested is not akin to the preadapted bodily agitations or perturbations of the infant, correlated by Greenwood to basic feelings of distress or disgust. Nor is it akin to the infant’s appetites, exemplified for Greenwood by its basic feelings of hunger or thirst (e.g. 83ff.). Increasing interest does not deflect the child in the way increasing distress or disgust may; indeed, a consuming interest will see the child’s attention fixated. Unlike appetites, feeling interest is not a conjunction of desire and localized sensations; unlike unsatisfied appetites, especially hunger and thirst, interests do not become intense and increasingly unpleasant sensations.

In sum, whether or not one adheres to the idea of innate basic emotions, it is not obvious that Greenwood has successfully made a case for including interest nor has she clearly distinguished agitations and appetites from emotions. Her pitfall, as she finally confesses, was “simply…to trawl the relevant literatures to inform [her] theorizing” (206). Nevertheless, her highly suggestive hypothesis for treating emotional and language development jointly is one many readers will find well worth pursuing.

 

 

© 2016 R.A. Goodrich

 

R.A. Goodrich is an associate of the A.R.C. Centre for the History of Emotions (University of Melbourne) and of the A.D.I. European Philosophy & History of Ideas Research Group (Deakin University), co-edits the online refereed arts journal, Double Dialogues, and co-ordinates with Maryrose Hall a longitudinal project investigating behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic development of higher-functioning children within the autistic spectrum and related disorders.