GeniesLoki

And I mean yes it's obviously true that emotions are culturally determined and there are looping constructs around this, but there are still feelings people experience that can usefully be described with emotion words.

So how do you reconcile the "felt sense that you are predisposed towards a particular class of actions or attitude towards the world" with the constructivist culturally-influenced view of emotions?

I think this is just how words work? Suppose I'm painting a picture. There is a set of behaviours, skills, and actions, and motivations, I'm doing, and those all interrelate, but the fact that I'm "doing art" is very much a culturally determined set of practices and labels.

The idea of a "looping effect" (I keep thinking it's called "looping construt", sorry) is super useful. There's a kind of feedback loop between experience and labelling, for basically any kind of experience and any kind of labelling, and I think that's what emotion words do.

But the feelings of being predisposed to an action are there regardless of what we label them, they're just also shaped by those labels.

The book is making two arguments in this space: 1. The specific labelling of emotional states has a strong impact on the experience of those states. 2. The word "emotion" applies specifically to out labels of those states. I think (1) is definitely true and (2) is nonsense.

Because that requires us to take emotion statements about non-linguistic entities as category errors. "The dog is afraid" is obviously a perfectly sensible statement, but Barrett's use of the word emotion does not consider that as valid because the dog cannot label that state.

Hmm. Emotions as reflecting a person's disposition is a concept I can go along with, but a felt sense of predisposition is something that I don't relate to at all, and give the side-eye to. Emotions seem to me to be mostly situational. A lot of my tastes are acquired.