I don’t have much to add to gjm’s description, but I’ll add a little bit of flavor to get at Said’s situational vs. dispositional dichotomy.
“Having a bad day” means something like experiencing a day in such a way that it causes mental suffering, and being an “angry person” is someone who reacts to mental suffering with violence. My claim is that those things aren’t clean categories: they are hard to separate from each other, and they are both situation and dispositional.
If you experience a lot of suffering from some external misfortune, you are more likely to react in a way that makes it worse, and also to build up a subconscious habit of reacting in this way, which in turn creates more chances for you to suffer and get angry and react and reinforce the pattern… eventually you will end up kicking a lot of vending machines.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to draw a circle around something called “bad day” or “angry person” and blame your machine kicking on that. These two things are causes and effects of each other, and of a million other situational and dispositional things. That’s what I mean by “bad day” and “angry person” being fake, and the definition of FAE that I googled doesn’t quite address this.
I disagree with your view for several reasons, but I think we’ve diverged from the topic enough that it’s probably not useful to continue down this tangent. (In any case, you’ve more or less explained what you mean to my satisfaction.)
I don’t have much to add to gjm’s description, but I’ll add a little bit of flavor to get at Said’s situational vs. dispositional dichotomy.
“Having a bad day” means something like experiencing a day in such a way that it causes mental suffering, and being an “angry person” is someone who reacts to mental suffering with violence. My claim is that those things aren’t clean categories: they are hard to separate from each other, and they are both situation and dispositional.
If you experience a lot of suffering from some external misfortune, you are more likely to react in a way that makes it worse, and also to build up a subconscious habit of reacting in this way, which in turn creates more chances for you to suffer and get angry and react and reinforce the pattern… eventually you will end up kicking a lot of vending machines.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to draw a circle around something called “bad day” or “angry person” and blame your machine kicking on that. These two things are causes and effects of each other, and of a million other situational and dispositional things. That’s what I mean by “bad day” and “angry person” being fake, and the definition of FAE that I googled doesn’t quite address this.
I see, thanks.
I disagree with your view for several reasons, but I think we’ve diverged from the topic enough that it’s probably not useful to continue down this tangent. (In any case, you’ve more or less explained what you mean to my satisfaction.)