Part IVThe Construction of Emotion Part IV of How to Design an Emotion: The Deconstruction and Computation of Emotional Meaning from First Principles

Abstract

In Part IV, I answer the question Part III leaves open: you construct your emotions. The world supplies the occasion; you supply the meaning. I call this view Emotional Constructivism and give it a working architecture. Most theories melt affect, feeling, and emotion into one process, so they cannot explain why the same feeling supports different emotions, and they strip emotion of accountability. I weigh the leading theories in a Weighted Sum Model trade study against the standards of Parts II and III, and I keep what survives: from Lisa Feldman Barrett, that we construct emotions rather than discover them; from appraisal theory, that significance and goals matter; from Klaus R. Scherer, the phases of an episode; from Jaak Panksepp, affect grounded in ancient brain systems. I alone set the criteria and the scores, so the study measures fit to my architecture, not truth. I define affect as the body’s physiological substrate, feeling as conscious awareness of that affect, and emotion as a goal-governed, context-sensitive act of interpretation by which an agent assigns meaning and significance to a feeling. Interpretation proposes candidate meanings, and commitment, a notion I extend from Robert Brandom, makes one of them binding. The Constructivist Semiotic Model of Emotions carries the sign into emotional life through a thirteen-stage flow, with a pause before commitment, and five programs check that the distinctions hold. What is shared: emotions are made, not triggered. What is new: layer separation, correctness conditions, and agentic redesign as the defining commitment.

Key concepts

Emotional Constructivism

“The world supplies the occasion; you supply the meaning.” (Chapter 9)

Constructivist Semiotic Model of Emotions

“A formal cognitive-semiotic architecture that specifies the constituents, relationships, and constraints through which an agent constructs emotional meaning.”

Affect

“The physiological and regulatory substrate, including valence, arousal, and motivational intensity, that generates the conditions of feeling without itself constituting feeling or emotion.”

Feeling

“The conscious metaperceptual awareness of a semiotically available affective experience with a distinctive affective character.”

Emotion

“A goal-governed, context-sensitive semiotic interpretive act by which an agent assigns meaning and significance to feeling.”

Ontological collapse

“The conflation of physiological affect, feeling, and emotion into stages of a single process.”

Commitment

“The normative act by which an interpreter authorizes one interpretation as emotionally binding, so that it admits correctness, error, justification, and revision.”

Interpretive governance

“The location of emotional meaning in an act an agent performs, so that the meaning admits correctness, error, justification, revision, and responsibility.”

Weighted sum model

“The trade-study method that scores candidate theories against weighted definitional, analytic, cognitive-semiotic, and computational criteria and sums the weighted scores into a total.”

Constructivist Interpretation Theory of Emotion

“The theory that interpretation, not appraisal, constructs emotional meaning; it marks where appraisal ends and interpretation begins.”

Constructivist Computational Model of Emotions

“I address the fourth problem through the Constructivist Computational Model of Emotions, answering a fundamental computational question: can emotional construction survive formal representation as an executable architecture?”

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