The Fall of Motivation, the Rise of Emotion: A Philosophical Insight to

Avoid the Saturation of Resembling Concepts

Yu Kanazawa (Kwansei Gakuin University)

Motivation is a topic which attracts interest of both educators and researchers around
the world. Echoing with the popularity of motivation, it is often the case that a
psychological model which posits cognition and emotion/affect is criticized as being
dichotomous, overlooking the important third mental faculty, motivation. Obviously,
the underlying premise behind such criticism is that motivation as well as emotion and
cognition is a distinct psychological entity that deserves special consideration.
It is true that there has been a long tradition of conceptualizing the human mental
faculty trichotomously. Plato separated human soul tripartitely into logistikon
(λογιστικόν, logical), thymoeides (θυμοειδές, spirited), and epithymetikon
(ἐπιθυμητικόν, libidinous), from the highest to the lowest (Plato, 380 BC/1892). Kantian
faculties of soul consist of the faculty of knowledge, valenced feelings, and the faculty
of desire/will (Kant, 1790/1987). Perice’s Kainopythagorean categories consist of
monad/firstness, dyad/secondness, and triad/thirdness (Peirce, nd/1958, para. 7.528;
cf. Peirce's theorem; de Waal, 2013, p. 42).
Such trichotomy of human mental faculty is also pervasive in the field of education and
AL. According to Dörnyei (2009), cognition, emotion/affect, and motivation are
distinguishable, and it is useful to maintain the tripartite view to conceptualize these
three dimensions of the mind as three subsystems, albeit interacting with one another
(pp. 234-235). As Dörnyei (1998) summarizes Gardner’s (1985) social psychological
approach, motivation is “a kind of central mental ‘engine’ or ‘energy-centre’ that
subsumes effort, want/will (cognition), and task-enjoyment (affect)” (Dörnyei, 1998, p.
122); thus, motivation is regarded to differ from emotion. The trichotomous paradigm
has now become a dominant approach in AL (Waninge, 2015, p. 196).
Is the trichotomous view impeccable? The answer is nay. In fact, surprisingly enough,
Scherer (1995), which Dörnyei (2009, p. 235) cites for further information, is against
the tripartite ontology. Scherer declares that “the Platonian distinction between
cognition, emotion, and conation has outrun its utility and may, in addition to
provoking futile debates, seriously hamper progress towards urgently needed
integrative approaches to the study of mental activity” (1995, p. 1) and therefore it is
needed “to drop the fruitless thinking in 3 boxes” (ibid., p. 4). To summarize Scherer’s
claims, psychological mechanisms are so complex and dynamic that it is inappropriate

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to assume that only emotion, cognition, and motivation are the special three distinct
mental modules in human mind. After all, the trichotomous distinction is nothing but
the blind succession of ancient Western philosophy.1 Scherer’s criticism against
trichotomy is not only ontological but also epistemological; trichotomous analysis of
human mind is no less flawed than the estimation that there exists only three distinct
parts constituting human mind. In reality, however, human mind consists of
uncountable dynamic systems; the mind is a holistic complexity.
Having questioned the dogmatic application of psychological trichotomy,2 a different
epistemology is called for. One approach is to turn to phenomenology: to deny any
numerical distinction and to try to capture each here-and-now phenomenon as it
occurs. Since any separation of mind into a limited number of modules cannot avoid
being an oversimplification, it is a legitimate alternative solution. Although
phenomenological qualitative studies have their own significant values, their findings
are not to be generalized and they are not to replace quantitative studies.
Another approach, which is more suitable for scientific investigation, is accomplished
via utilizing the Occam’s razor. Motivation, which directs emotional energy and
cognitive attention to an external or internal object, can be interpreted as an amalgam
of emotion and cognition, hence shaving it away from the model (e.g., Nobuhara,
2017). 3 This is not a retrogression to the Cartesian dichotomy; cognition and emotion
are no longer regarded as isolated mental entities but two epistemologically salient
polarities in the mental continuum (Imbir et al., 2015). The emotion-cognition
distinction in this sense is observer-dependent and epistemological rather than
observer-independent and ontological, making it harmonious with dynamic systems
ontology (Duncan & Barrett, 2007; Barrett, 2009). This emotion-cognition view is more
parsimonious and is sometimes more powerful than the trichotomy, as is implied by
the fact that the emotion-cognition model which posits no special module for
motivation has been utilized in the latest investigations (Immordino-Yang, 2016;
Schütze, 2017; Sharwood Smith, 2017). To take the MOGUL framework as an example
(Sharwood Smith & Truscott, 2014), aside from the emotional/affective structures, no
distinct module for motivation is modeled. After all, what underlies motivation for L2
learning is nothing but emotion (especially positive emotions), which is reported to be
consistently and strongly correlated with motivation-related processes and variables
(MacIntyre & Vincze, 2017). Moreover, shaving away motivation may also be effective
to avoid the saturation and confusion of a plethora of resembling concepts with
overlapping neural substrates.
In conclusion, taking all these facts into account, it is justified to utilize the

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emotion-cognition continuum paradigm with no explicit reference to motivation.
Furthermore, emotion, whose importance is increasingly acknowledged and studied in
AL (e.g., Dewaele, 2013), may well be a better and purer psychological concept/entity
to adopt more widely instead of motivation (Ciompi, 1997/2005), especially at the
micro-level analysis (cf. Kanazawa, 2016; 2017).

Notes.
1. Furthermore, Danziger’s (1997, Chapter 3 & 7) historico-philosophical review vividly
shows that motivation is a flawed concept, so much for being a pure psychological
entity. In fact, the signification of each psychological concept has constantly been
influenced by social factors and has changed dramatically throughout history. In
fact, each constituent of Platonian hierarchical tripartite souls barely bears a
semantic resemblance to the present counterparts of cognition, emotion, and
motivation.
2. It must be noted that what is proposed here is not to be interpreted as a rejection
of psychological trichotomy altogether. It is undeniable that the trichotomous
anchoring has been and will be indispensable in multidisciplinary investigations (cf.
Eco & Sebeok, 1988; Minsky, 2006, p. 318). However, they should not limit their
constituents to emotion/affect, cognition, and motivation/will/volition nor expel
other approaches of analysis.
3. In fact, the term motivation is often used synonymously to emotion/affect (e.g.,
Polat, 2016). In such a case, motivation and emotion denote the same
phenomenon from different perspectives rather than being ontologically distant
entities.

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