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What Emotions Really Are (In the Theory of Constructed Emotions)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jeremy Pober
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Abstract

Recently, Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues have introduced the Theory of Constructed Emotions (TCE), in which emotions are constituted by a process of categorizing the self as being in an emotional state. The view, however, has several counterintuitive implications: for instance, a person can have multiple distinct emotions at once. Further, the TCE concludes that emotions are constitutively social phenomena. In this article, I explicate the TCE*, which, while substantially similar to the TCE, makes several distinct claims aimed at avoiding the counterintuitive implications plaguing the TCE. Further, because of the changes that comprise the TCE*, emotions are not constitutively social phenomena.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 85 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 640 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This article has benefited from the input of an unusually large number of people. I thank Lisa Feldman Barrett for piquing my interest in her work, as well as Matt Barker, Agnieszka Jaworska, Adam Kovach, Christopher Masciari, and Jim Sparrell for helpful discussions and comments. I especially thank Alex Madva, Carlos Montemayor, and Eric Schwitzgebel for comments on multiple earlier drafts of this article, as well as two anonymous reviewers for Philosophy of Science.

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