Constituting Emotional Phenomena — A Mach-Influenced Empiricist Perspective

Using the philosophical writings of Ernst Mach as a backdrop, I explore how concepts and classifications partlyconstitute the phenomena studied in the science of emotion by selecting features from a larger population offeatures. This process of selection is a matter of decision and is not inevitable, but it promotes populatingconcepts with empirical content. The openness of empirical concepts suggests that this selectionistconstituting does not characterise only the early stages in the development of a science because backgroundand foreground shifts are potentially ongoing. The theory of psychological construction, which contends thatemotional episodes are constructed on the fly out of shifting sets of components, exemplifies this selectionistsense of constituting to the extent that it advocates for a resemblance nominalism, similar to that of Locke, inwhich selection is involved in naming kinds. Examples of constituting can be seen in changing definitions ofwhether animals experience emotion and in the choice of causal models.