DOI: Crossref DOI pending · Also available as 10.5281/zenodo.23676664
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@techreport{cezjah2026wp07,
author = {C{\'e}zjah},
title = {The Constructivist Linguistics of Emotion: The Symbolic Threshold, Emotionese, and the Two Levels of Emotional Meaning},
institution = {New Intellectual LLC},
address = {Miami, FL},
type = {Working paper},
number = {7},
year = {2026},
month = {oct},
url = {https://newintellectual.com/pages/how-to-design-an-emotion-wp-07},
note = {Crossref DOI pending. Also available as https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23676664}
}Abstract
Do animals and infants have emotions? I argue that observing arousal, expression, or feeling cannot settle the question, because emotional meaning depends on a symbolic architecture that feeling does not supply. I define meaning as a structured representation that a system interprets in light of its stake, and I name four thresholds a system must cross to reach it: symbolic detachment, endorsement, grammar, and metarepresentation. I call the symbolic system of emotional meaning Emotionese: learned, public, normative, and confined to one domain, unlike the language of thought. The Emotional Meaning Architecture, a ladder of ten levels, places the line between feeling and emotional meaning between Level 4 and Level 5. On current evidence, animals feel and stop short of that line; infants feel and then cross it, and I name three results that would defeat the claim. I then separate the kinds of reality that people collapse into one, name the resulting error misattribution, and distinguish two levels of emotional meaning: a prototype, one agent’s authorized construct, and a stereotype, its socially stabilized form. What is new is a threshold model with a stated test, and one account that runs from that threshold through two levels of stabilization. The book gives the full treatment.
Contents
- 1. Introduction: Feeling Without Meaning
- 2. What Meaning Requires
- 3. Language, Symbols, and Four Thresholds
- 4. Emotionese
- 5. The Emotional Meaning Architecture
- 6. Kinds of Reality and the Error of Misattribution
- 7. Two Levels: Prototype and Stereotype
- 8. What Is Shared and What Is New
- 9. Objections and Replies
- 10. Scope and Limits
- 11. Conclusion
- Appendix: Code, UML Diagrams, and Input/Output
- References
Relation to the book
This paper restates, in new prose, the argument of Chapters 10 to 12 of How to Design an Emotion (Cézjah 2026, chaps. 10–12). The book is the full treatment.
Record
- Constructivist Linguistics of Emotion
- Emotionese
- Emotional Meaning Architecture
- symbolic detachment
- symbolic threshold
- metarepresentation
- commitment
- misattribution
- prototype and stereotype
- language of thought
- animal emotions
- infant emotional development
- Robert Brandom
- Emotional Constructivism
- Constructivist Semiotics
- Constructivist Semiotic Sign
- Constructivist Semiotic Model of Emotions
- Theory of Constrained Identity
- affect, feeling, and emotion
- theory of emotion
- concept theory
- semiotics
- affective science
- philosophy of emotion
- affective neuroscience
- social and affective neuroscience
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