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Dear Mike, Passed the first year philosophy distinctions being made, and beyond Terry¹s use of a weasel word such as ³essence², the issue for me is: ³what insights do we gain when we make this distinction?². And, by extension: ³what insights does Terry gain when he makes his distinctions²; and, ³what insights does Don gain when he makes his distinctions²? That is, if we distinguish between the observable body responses and the account of affects (emotions) that people might make in a causal account (we observed that they blushed - they said they felt embarrassed), what is the new knowledge or awareness that we have gained and then, what are we able to do with this new knowledge or awareness? My PhD, for example, spends much time offering theoretical accounts of the affects that we structure in our engagements with literary objects. I argue that the affects (emotions) that we cultivate with these objects are cultural and historical and psychological etc. I have to presume that the texts (objects) are received within a knowing cultural structure. I do NOT presume or care whether there is an ACTUAL relationship such that ³I cried when the heroine died because I felt sad². Feeling sad is one way of structuring the reader¹s relationship with this textual event. The fact that the reader might claim ³ownership² of this emotion seems natural to many people, but it really is insignificant in my experiment. Hegel helps here when he complains (somewhere - I don¹t have a source beyond my memory for this) that the problem with people¹s experiences with art is that they cuddle their emotions (³I like this painting²). Taking this ³objective² approach to distinctions, we can allow ourselves to formulate experiments that then might produce useful outcomes. Whether we need to philosophically PROVE in some kind of ABSOLUTE way the TRUTH of our claims is another issue. Science does not move forward by avoiding distinctions nor does it advance by whipping itself nightly with sets of irritant distinctions that have no operational significance. They landed on the moon with an account of Pi to 4 decimal places. This was accurate enough to do the job. Philosophically it did not answer the problem of root 2. From my perspective, Terry wants to make distinctions that are useful to him. I often find his distinctions to be useful to my work. Sometimes Terry seems to proceed as if he is justifying his approach by recourse to some TRUTH in his approach that overpowers the distinctions that other people bother to make that are useful to them. Sometimes he seems to be arguing for consistency in the approaches of other people, which is a good thing to ask for and other times he seems to be simply pointing out that there is a lack of an ABSOLUTE in the account that others give. I take from Terry the dose of CORRECTIVE logic that I need and I resist the tempting but tart apples in the bowl. So says a student of Plato this Thursday. Cheers keith On 6/02/2014 4:04 am, "Paul Mike Zender" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >Terry: > >If you are married, I suggest you make your spouse really mad about >something to test your statement: "emotions >as feelings (happiness, sadness, contentment etc) are merely >conditioned conceptualised interpretations of body responses that in >essence do not themselves exist." If your wife is like mine you'll find >out pretty quick that emotions exist. > >On a more serious note, I find a conception of reality that says emotions >don't exist to be faulty at its core. By such a model of reality the >thought behind such a statement doesn't exist either. > >Mike > ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------