Posted by Estella on May 17, 2006, at 20:14:02
three questions...
(there are no right or wrong answers i'm just interested in what people think. i won't proceed to argue anything i promise);-)
1. do animals (dogs, cats, rats etc) have emotions? how about human infants?2. of the following factors:
-body changes (racing heart etc)
-cognition / judgment / belief / apppraisal (that is dangerous etc)
-phenomenology / the felt quality / the experiential aspect / what it is like (how happiness feels)which seems to be most central to emotion?
(what i am getting at here is whether one of those factors might be both necessary and sufficient so if you had one in the absence of the others then you would be in an emotional state. or whether some combination is needed).
3. are unconscious emotions possible?
this is much debated. freud thought that while emotion had to be consciously experienced (by the way he defined emotion) the causes of emotion (what made you mad, who you are mad at) might be repressed / unconscious. does this seem right... or would it be possible to be mad (say) without any conscious experience (phenomenology / felt quality) at all?
i'm interested in what people think because philosophers intuitions tend to go all funny when they are in the grip of a theory. (they tend to lose their 'common sense' and their intuitions can be rather odd and not really shared by the rest of the linguistic community)
thanks.
poster:Estella
thread:645293
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060513/msgs/645293.html