Working Paper 07: The Constructivist Linguistics of Emotion: Detailed Deck

Detailed deck for Working Paper 07, The Constructivist Linguistics of Emotion: The Symbolic Threshold, Emotionese, and the Two Levels of Emotional Meaning, from How to Design an Emotion (Universal Moral Concepts II) by Cézjah (New Intellectual LLC). Abstract. Do animals and infants have emotions? Observing arousal, expression, or feeling cannot settle the question, because emotional meaning depends on a symbolic architecture that feeling does not supply. Meaning is a structured representation that a system interprets in light of its stake, reached across four thresholds: symbolic detachment, endorsement, grammar, and metarepresentation. The symbolic system of emotional meaning is Emotionese: learned, public, normative, and confined to one domain, unlike the language of thought. The Emotional Meaning Architecture, a ladder of ten levels, places the line between feeling and emotional meaning between Level 4 and Level 5.