The purpose of this paper is to clarify the essential features of psychological categories used in the mind sciences such as psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience from the perspective of theoretical psychology. I shall focus especially on the category of “emotion”. Firstly, I shall examine how psychology and philosophy have categorized emotions in referring to the history of philosophy and psychology and demonstrate that psychological categorization in general is laden with practical and social meanings. I shall proceed to highlight the problems regarding psychological methodology and basic theoretical assumptions, assumptions that are modeled on physical science, resulting in a de-contextualization and de-temporalization. In conclusion, I shall propose some possible solutions to overcome these problems in the mind sciences.

    I present an approach to the problems of perception that explicitly considers the material basis of the perceptual information picked up by active agents. Taking into account the reservoir of information external to the perceiver makes it possible to study activity before sensory signals have been aroused by stimuli, an activity that orients the organs of perception and explores for the external information. Drawing on J. J. Gibsonʼs ecological approach and the recent discussions on reservoir computing, I illustrate how the consideration of the material basis of potentially informative patterns could fundamentally change the traditional theories on perception.

    In this paper, I examine the relationship between emotion and body. First, I briefly survey the history of the concept of emotion with referring to the concept of reason. Second, I explain three ways to access the mind and consider the controversy of nature vs culture about emotion from a viewpoint of the intersubjective body. I argue that the controversy depends on what aspects of the body we focus, suggesting that nature and culture in this context are not necessarily exclusive. Finally, I introduce the experiment we have conducted and confirm that the body involved in emotion is social and intersubjective even at the physical level.

    In his “Demonstratives”, David Kaplan discussed certain nonintensional operators called monsters. The operators, unlike ordinary ones, change the reference of indexicals by shifting the parameter of context. Although Kaplan denied monsters at least in English on the ground of both the doctrine of direct reference and the principle of compositionality, many monstrous phenomena of singular terms have been confirmed by some semanticists lately, which seems to urge Kaplanian semantics to be revised. In this survey article, we offer a survey of recent developments in the semantics of indexicals, variables, and proper names by focusing on monsters, and give some suggestions about direct reference, monsters, and compositionality.