Emotions Make Claims, And Their Claims Can Be True Or False
I appreciate the general thrust of this piece, but I find this aspect concerning because it fails to acknowledge that emotions (or their analogues) are likely to have evolved long before linguistics or the capability to assert and evaluate claims.
From introspection it seems possible that emotions can be triggered by non-linguistic situations (giant spider jumps on my child → anger), and also it is possible for emotions to not cause logical claims to form… (e.g. “why am I feeling this way?”)
That pre-linguistic/non-logical layer is super important, IMO. The rest of this piece is very useful for the higher linguistic + logical layer.
The kinds of claims that emotions make are often non-verbal and pre-linguistic, in my experience. If a giant spider jumps on your child, you might have some kind of visceral or embodied expectation of your child being harmed if you don’t do something. That’s still an implicit claim, even if it’s not in a linguistic form. You can use various introspective techniques to translate those kinds of implicit claims into language, but it’s also possible to work directly with the levels below language.
Though often translating those pre-verbal claims into language does make the process much easier. Not necessarily because the language would be required, but because doing so forces you to focus your attention on the lower layers of thought in a way that lets you extract the claims they’re making.
This is definitely not the main point or even an important point, but:
If a giant spider jumps on your child
It is very unlikely that a giant spider will ever jump on your child. Any spider that is likely to jump on your child (or on anyone or anything) is overwhelmingly likely to be very small.
(Also, any spider than can jump on anything is almost always going to be completely harmless, but of course that generally doesn’t affect your visceral reactions.)
I appreciate the general thrust of this piece, but I find this aspect concerning because it fails to acknowledge that emotions (or their analogues) are likely to have evolved long before linguistics or the capability to assert and evaluate claims.
From introspection it seems possible that emotions can be triggered by non-linguistic situations (giant spider jumps on my child → anger), and also it is possible for emotions to not cause logical claims to form… (e.g. “why am I feeling this way?”)
That pre-linguistic/non-logical layer is super important, IMO. The rest of this piece is very useful for the higher linguistic + logical layer.
The kinds of claims that emotions make are often non-verbal and pre-linguistic, in my experience. If a giant spider jumps on your child, you might have some kind of visceral or embodied expectation of your child being harmed if you don’t do something. That’s still an implicit claim, even if it’s not in a linguistic form. You can use various introspective techniques to translate those kinds of implicit claims into language, but it’s also possible to work directly with the levels below language.
Though often translating those pre-verbal claims into language does make the process much easier. Not necessarily because the language would be required, but because doing so forces you to focus your attention on the lower layers of thought in a way that lets you extract the claims they’re making.
This is definitely not the main point or even an important point, but:
It is very unlikely that a giant spider will ever jump on your child. Any spider that is likely to jump on your child (or on anyone or anything) is overwhelmingly likely to be very small.
(Also, any spider than can jump on anything is almost always going to be completely harmless, but of course that generally doesn’t affect your visceral reactions.)