The Language of Emotion, the Emotions, and Nominalist Bootstrapping

When comparing the literature on children’s theories of mind with that on children’s use of language about mind, one is struck by an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, the performance of preschool children on a variety of tasks demonstrates that they have a good deal to learn about mental states (Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Perner, this volume); on the other hand, research into the language of preschool children seems to indicate that they do learn a vocabulary that allows them to refer to states of mind (Bloom, Rispoli, Gartner, & Hafitz, 1989; Bloom, Tackeff, & Lahey, 1984; Hood & Bloom, 1979; Moore & Furrow, this volume). ¹ Thus, children seem to learn the terms that refer to mental states before they learn about the referents. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that this contradiction is only apparent. In so doing, I address the influence of children’s nascent theories of mind on the way they learn language and the impact this has on the language of emotion and emotions themselves. A further goal is to describe a likely path that children take to move beyond their early theories of mind. In general, I am concerned with how children learn terms with abstract reference. Specifically, I am concerned with how children learn emotion words, a special case of abstract reference.