Towards a Grammar of Emotions

Sloman, Aaron (1982) Towards a Grammar of Emotions. New Universities Quarterly, 36 (3). pp. 230-238.

Full text available as:

PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader 40 Kb

Alternative URL: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/81-95.html#46

Abstract

By analysing what we mean by 'A longs for B', and similar descriptions of emotional states we see that they involve rich cognitive structures and processes, i.e. computations. Anything which could long for its mother, would have to have some sort of representation of its mother, would have to believe that she is not in the vicinity, would have to be able to represent the possibility of being close to her, would have to desire that possibility, and would have to be to some extent pre-occupied or obsessed with that desire. The paper includes a fairly detailed discussion of what it means to say 'X is angry with Y', and relationships between anger, exasperation, annoyance, dismay, etc. Emotions are contrasted with attitudes and moods.

Comments/Discussion

This paper was published many years ago in an obscure journal, but may be relevant as an early attempt to construe emotions not just as involving states (e.g. being happy, sad, angry, etc.) but as involving processes in which various things interact e.g. motives and beliefs interact and produce new desires or intentions, which may or may not be suppressed, and which may compete with other things going on for attention. This process view of emotions focuses attention on requirements for mechanisms and architectures of various sorts which are capable of supporting different kinds of emotions, and other affective states and processes. Moreover some architectures can include all the mechanisms required to generate something like what we call anger or fear or jealousy without including self-monitoring mechanisms that would be required for the emotion to be felt. Moreover even in individuals that are capable of feeling or becoming aware of their emotions other factors may prevent that self-awareness -- a fact that is often used in plays or novels about people who are jealous or infatuated but unaware of the fact. I believe much research on emotions has simply ignored these possibilities. This is one of a series of papers on the Birmingham Cognition and Affect web site attempting to demonstrate how new insights into the nature of mind and relations between mind and body can be developed within the 'design-based approach' discussing mechanisms, information, control processes, and architectures, and using them to generate taxonomies of concepts, instead of starting from colloquial language or laboratory judgements, i.e. taking the 'design stance' rather than the intentional stance or the physical stance, or the behaviourist stance to the study of mind. Of course, the latter stances may sometimes provide additional information about what needs to be explained.

Repository Staff Only: edit this item