How to Design An Emotion

The Constructivist Linguistics of Emotion: The Symbolic Threshold, Emotionese, and the Two Levels of Emotional Meaning

The Constructivist Linguistics of Emotion: The Symbolic Threshold, Emotionese, and the Two Levels of Emotional Meaning

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. Working paper 7 of 8 in the series on the frameworks of How to Design an Emotion: The Deconstruction and Computation of Emotional Meaning from First Principles (Universal Moral Concepts III, New Intellectual LLC, 2026; ISBN 979-8-9898135-9-9 paperback, 979-8-9898135-3-7 Kindle). The book is the full treatment. Book page: https://newintellectual.com/how-to-design-an-emotion ; related: Part V .

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