I’ve come to see that emotion looks a lot like a confused, confounded category. We use “emotion” to point at a lot of different things, evidenced by if nothing else the way people vacillate between whether or not to talk about countable, distinct emotions (e.g. I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m sad and angry at the same time, etc.) or uncountable, fuzzy emotional energy (e.g. I’m a little sad, I’m very angry, I’m a mix of sad and angry, etc.). So this makes it hard to talk about the category we colloquially call “emotion(s)” and say anything much about their etiology.
This doesn’t mean we can’t try, but so long as we remain confused at best we can talk about some aspect of the ball-of-mud labeled “emotion”. In that sense I think, for example, it’s both right that emotions are ultimately actions and that they are ultimately messages, because much of the work is being done by your perspective on the confusion rather than the thing itself.
Maybe.
I’ve come to see that emotion looks a lot like a confused, confounded category. We use “emotion” to point at a lot of different things, evidenced by if nothing else the way people vacillate between whether or not to talk about countable, distinct emotions (e.g. I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m sad and angry at the same time, etc.) or uncountable, fuzzy emotional energy (e.g. I’m a little sad, I’m very angry, I’m a mix of sad and angry, etc.). So this makes it hard to talk about the category we colloquially call “emotion(s)” and say anything much about their etiology.
This doesn’t mean we can’t try, but so long as we remain confused at best we can talk about some aspect of the ball-of-mud labeled “emotion”. In that sense I think, for example, it’s both right that emotions are ultimately actions and that they are ultimately messages, because much of the work is being done by your perspective on the confusion rather than the thing itself.