Part VThe Constructivist Linguistics of Emotion Part V of How to Design an Emotion: The Deconstruction and Computation of Emotional Meaning from First Principles

Abstract

In Part V, I state where feeling ends and emotional meaning begins, and I gather the whole argument into one answer. Meaning is a structured representation that a system interprets in light of its stake. A mind reaches it across four thresholds: detachment, endorsement, grammar, and metarepresentation. I call the symbolic system of emotional meaning Emotionese. Unlike the language of thought, it is learned, public, normative, and confined to one domain. I test the threshold with the Emotional Meaning Architecture, a ladder of ten levels. Animals feel, and on the evidence I have, they stop short of the line between Level 4 and Level 5. Infants feel, then climb across. Commitment, which I take from Robert Brandom, attaches below assertion: an agent commits to a concept for its own felt state. I then separate the kinds of reality that people collapse into one and name the mistake misattribution. You construct an emotion, others infer it, and science correlates it. A prototype is one agent’s authorized construct; a stereotype is its socially stabilized form. Music then models the levels, from instrument and sound to timbre, composition, and genre. What is shared: words and concepts shape emotional life, and an emotional category holds instances that share no single essence. What is new: one account that runs from a symbolic threshold, through two levels of stabilization, to emotional categories and the grammar that organizes them. I close with final definitions of affect, feeling, and emotion, the last a goal-governed, context-sensitive interpretive construct.

Key concepts

Emotionese

“Emotionese is the symbolic system through which agents construct, stabilize, and communicate emotional meaning.” (Chapter 10)

Symbolic detachment

“This is the capacity to invoke an identifier independently of its triggering instance.” (Chapter 10)

Emotional Meaning Architecture

“To make the question precise, I build the Emotional Meaning Architecture, a ladder of ten levels.” (Chapter 11)

Commitment (below assertion)

“At Level 5, an agent commits to a concept for its own felt state and marks that commitment with an identifier, and the commitment binds, and can fail, before the agent asserts anything about the state in full propositional form.” (Chapter 11)

Misattribution

“We take what is real in experience, affect and feeling, and treat it as if it already carries emotional meaning.” (Chapter 12)

Prototype

“A prototype denotes the first-person construct an agent produces by organizing a state under a symbolic identifier and authorizing it under identity conditions.” (Chapter 12)

Stereotype

“A stereotype denotes the socially stabilized form of that construct, maintained through communication, correction, and consensus across agents.” (Chapter 12)

Phenomenological timbre

“I name the difference phenomenological timbre: the qualitative character through which a feeling presents itself to you, beyond how pleasant it is.” (Chapter 13)

Emotional grammar

“The rules by which an agent organizes feeling into intelligible emotional categories.”

Constructivist Linguistics of Emotion

“The account of how emotional meaning acquires symbolic structure, public communication, and recognizable categories.”

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