Translating untranslatable feelings: Skinner and the vocabulary of subjectivity

Abstract

The title of chapter 10 of B. F. Skinner’s About Behaviorism is possibly ironic: it is not really about exploring “The Inner World of Motivation and Emotion,” but about treating motivation and emotion as behavioral relations, necessarily dependent on social processes. In this essay, dialoguing with Skinner’s relational and contextualist perspective, I conduct an exploratory analysis of the language of feelings based on three examples of names for feelingstypical of Germanic culture—Schadenfreude, Futterneid, and Ruinenlust. I derive threeconclusions from the analysis: (1) It is only possible to understand what it is to feel, and also to understand how words that refer to feelings arise and are taught, by analyzing the relations between bodily states and the contexts that produce them; (2) The emission of verbal responses “descriptive of feelings” can be under the control (mainly or exclusively) of public variables that affect the speaker; (3) The wide cultural variability in the language of feelings is explained not by differences between bodily states, but by differences between the typical contingencies of each culture.