![]() As my title indicates, this theory construes love as a psychological syndrome, or as a complex psychological condition of the organism accompanied by a set of symptoms that flow from that condition. My aim in this paper is to make progress on resolving the confusion surrounding love’s nature by presenting and defending a theory of love that, I shall argue, has a strong yet defeasible claim to satisfying the three theoretical constraints outlined above. A third and final one is what I shall call data vindication: theories of love must vindicate every clear, pre-theoretical truth about love. Another theoretical constraint here, however, is that of extensional adequacy: theories of love must do a good job of capturing cases of genuine love. Accordingly, we should regard this fact about love’s multi-dimensionality as something that theories of love must capture. Nevertheless, they offer some direction here by suggesting that love is an enormously complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon-one that’s attitudinal, dispositional, affective, conative, cognitive, volitional, and behavioral. Rather than delivering a clear answer to the question of love’s nature, then, all of these plausible views lead to confusion on this matter. ![]() 3 Still other accounts construe love as a disposition ( Naar 2013: 344, 352) or as a collection of dispositions ( Franklin-Hall & Jaworska 2017: 22–23 Smuts 2104a: 511), while others construe it instead as a complex of different attitudes and dispositions ( Hurka 2017: 163–164) or as a state of valuing both the beloved and a personal relationship shared with them that’s constituted by a complex set of attitudes and dispositions ( Kolodny 2003: 150–153). 2 Other accounts construe love as a kind of attachment ( Abramson & Leite 2011: 677 Harcourt 2017: 43 Wonderly 2017: 235, 243), where attachment, as I shall understand it, minimally consists in affective dispositions to experience feelings of security or comfort when in sufficient proximity to the beloved, as well as feelings of distress due to extended separation from the beloved or to the mere prospect thereof. It has less to do with believing, feeling, or mere desiring than with having a practical, disinterested concern for the beloved’s welfare, where this consists in having a certain set of volitional dispositions and constraints geared toward the promotion of the beloved’s welfare ( Frankfurt 2001: 5, 8 2004: 42–43, 79, 87). Similarly, Harry Frankfurt famously maintains that love is primarily a volitional phenomenon, or a “configuration of the will” in his memorable words (2004: 55, 87). 1īy contrast, some laypeople construe love as a behavioral phenomenon: love is something that lovers do, or rather some set of behaviors or actions that they perform. Other views seem to construe love as a collection of affective, conative, and cognitive attitudes ( Soble 1990: 149 Helm 2010: 152). There are also conative views, which construe love as a set of desires that we have toward the beloved ( Green 1997: 209, 216 Nozick 1989: 70 Reis & Aron 2008: 80), as well as cognitive ones, which instead construe love as an appreciation or an awareness of the beloved’s value ( Ehman 1976: 99 Velleman 1999: 360, 362), or primarily as a way of seeing the beloved ( Jollimore 2011: 4, 30). One such attitudinal view is the purely affective view that construes love as a mere feeling of affection toward the beloved. According to many of these views, for example, love is an attitude or a collection of attitudes. In fact, there’s a dizzying array of plausible views on this matter that can be found in the philosophical literature and everyday life. I conclude that we have good grounds for being optimistic about the theory even though it calls for further development and scrutiny.ĭespite love’s pervasiveness in literature and its presence in many of our lives, widespread disagreement about its nature persists. Then I defend my theory against two objections that target its extensional adequacy. ![]() First, I argue that it has a strong yet defeasible claim to satisfying the three theoretical constraints. After laying down three theoretical constraints that viable theories of love must satisfy, I sketch my syndrome theory of love in detail and then defend it. More specifically, I argue that love is an affectionate loyalty that takes different shapes across cases and that manifests itself in some set of behavioral and emotional expressions, where this set of expressions also varies across cases. What is love? In this paper I argue that love is a psychological syndrome, or an enormously complex cluster of psychological attitudes and dispositions that’s accompanied by a corresponding set of symptoms that flow from it.
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