A problem which bedevils the study of emotions, and the study of consciousness, is that we assume a shared understanding of many everyday concepts, such as ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’, ‘pleasure’, ‘pain’, ‘desire’, ‘awareness’, etc. Unfortunately, these concepts are inherently very complex, ill-defined, and used with different meanings by different people. Moreover this goes unnoticed, so that people think they understand what they are referring to even when their understanding is very unclear. Consequently there is much discussion that is inherently vague, often at cross-purposes, and with apparent disagreements that arise out of people unwittingly talking about different things. We need a framework which explains how there can be all the diverse phenomena that different people refer to when they talk about emotions and other affective states and processes. The conjecture on which this paper is based is that adult humans have a type of information-processing architecture, with components which evolved at different times, including a rich and varied collection of components whose interactions can generate all the sorts of phenomena that different researchers have labelled “emotions”. Within this framework we can provide rational reconstructions of many everyday concepts of mind. We can also allow a variety of different architectures, found in children, brain damaged adults, other animals, robots, software agents, etc., where different architectures support different classes of states and processes, and therefore different mental ontologies. Thus concepts like ‘emotion’, ‘awareness’, etc. will need to be interpreted differently when referring to different architectures. We need to limit the class of architectures under consideration, since for any class of behaviours there are indefinitely many architectures