ABSTRACT
One of the major figures in the social constructionist movement in the study of emotion is the philosopher Rom Harré. Because Harré’s view, which he sometimes calls “emotionology,” is an extremely influential one and because the cognitive linguistic view of emotion that I have been working on in the past 15 years bear certain important similarities, it makes sense to survey these similarities, as well as the differences, between his and my views. As will be seen, the cognitive linguistic view is in many ways sympathetic to Harré’s proposals. The basic similarity between them is that in both theories language is seen as playing an important role in the study of the nature of emotion concepts. One of the differences between them appears to be in how these linguistic programs are carried out in this study. Emotionology is a heavily linguistic-semantic program, but its program cannot be fully carried out because emotionology does not have the appropriate kind of linguistics necessary for the analysis that the program sets out to accomplish. The major difference between the two approaches is that emotionology, and social constructionism in general, claims a high degree of cultural relativity at the expense of universality, whereas the cognitive view gives equal weight to both relativistic and universal factors in the conceptualization of emotion. In this chapter, I discuss in some detail the major similarities and differences between the two positions.
