Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two main views have informed the literature on the psy-chology of emotion in the past few decades. On one side,cognitivists identify emotions with processes such as judg-ments, evaluations and appraisals. On the other side, advo-cates of non-cognitive approaches leave the “intellectual” as-pects of emotional experience out of the emotion itself, in-stead identifying emotions with embodied processes involv-ing physiological changes. Virtually everyone on either sideof the cognitive/non-cognitive divide identify William James’view, also known as the James-Lange theory, fully on the non-cognitivist side. But this is a mistake. Re-interpreting James’writings in its scientific context, this paper argues that he actu-ally rejected the cognitive/non-cognitive divide, such that hisview of emotions did not fit either side—that is, James was nota “Jamesian” in the sense the term is used in the literature.