Recently, McGinn has proposed a new theory of disgust. This theory makes empirical claims as to the history and function of disgust, yet does not take into account contemporary scientific research on the subject. This essay evaluates his theory for its merits as an account of disgust, and as a piece of scholarship more generally, and finds it lacking.

I use a number of McGinn’s ideas to identify likely confounds in the induction of incidental disgust as the basis of the moral amplification effect.

Strohminger is revolted by McGinn’s book, The Meaning of Disgust. We argue that her reaction of repugnance highlights one of the greatest mysteries in the psychology of disgust: this emotion is at times elicited by abstract ideological concerns rather than physical threats of infection or contamination. Here we describe the theoretical challenge of accounting for nonpathogenic disgust elicitors, which include spiritual defilement, violations of the “natural order,” and, apparently, McGinn’s latest publication.

The Meaning of Disgust is a vivid example of how interdisciplinary research can go horribly wrong. Strohminger’s criticisms serve as a good starting point to discuss some of the issues that need to be addressed by the growing number of researchers who choose to conduct interdisciplinary research in philosophy and psychology. I argue that McGinn’s approach to science in The Meaning of Disgust serves as a useful contrast to the ideal, and that it illustrates the most important virtue necessary for (...) being a good interdisciplinarian: intellectual humility. (shrink)

In his The Meaning of Disgust, Colin McGinn employs elements of the phenomenological theory of disgust advanced by Aurel Kolnai in 1929. Kolnai’s treatment of what he calls “material” disgust and of its primary elicitors—putrefying organic matter, bodily wastes and secretions, sticky contaminants, vermin—anticipates more recent scientific treatments of this emotion as a mode of protective recoil. While Nina Strohminger charges McGinn with neglecting such scientific studies, we here attempt to show how Kolnai goes beyond experimental findings in his careful (...) description of the phenomenological differences between disgust and other emotions of forceful disapproval. (shrink)

Strohminger gives a lively and accurate critique of McGinn’s book but is somewhat inaccurate herself in describing the current theoretical state of the science on disgust. My comment primarily focuses on the issues I have with McGinn’s and Strohminger’s discussions and briefly offers a possible unifying account of the function and meaning of disgust.