Member-only story
The Sound of Feeling
Happy Monday good people!
For the psychologists, affective neuroscientists and musicians amongst you, I am currently writing a chapter, I tentatively call The Sound of Feeling.
There is lot of confusion in the debate over whether emotions are natural kinds, or can be objectively identified within ourselves and others. In my opinion, a primary reason why is because often scientists, and psychologists are arguing at cross purposes. Some seek to identify an emotion by analogy; usually claiming that emotions have an essence, a conceptual set of characteristics that distinguish them from all other constructs, and qualifies them as being members of the same set or category.
Scientists also seek to identify emotions not by what they are, but by the behavior of so called emotional neural, biochemical and/or anatomical circuits; this is the functionalist approach.
In The Sound of Feeling, my goal is to use music as a metaphor, to kid of provide scaffolding around the harder discussion of emotions. So a musical instrument corresponds to emotional circuits, musical notes correspond to the elusive emotional tokens, and of course while we have the laws of sound that govern how a song or musical piece is constructed, we don’t (yet) have access to any such laws of consciousness with which we can analyze emotional quailia.
Philosophers describe a category as a set of constructs (objects) that are instantiated from a common concept or essence. Another point of confusion in the debate over whether emotions are natural kinds is that a distinction is rarely made between the emotional “song” which is subjectively constructed vs the category of an infinite and diverse number of emotions belonging to a “genre” that we have arbitrarily labeled as happiness, sadness, fear etc.
In another chapter: How to Define an Emotion, I describe how the Structuralist philosopher, Ferdinand de Saussure wrote about the “arbitrariness of the sign.” Basically what he meant is that the conceptual labels, identifiers or as he referred to them, sound-images are arbitrarily assigned to a linguistic construct as a function of socio-cultural convention. What this means is that for any given word (identifier) assigned to a construct (like an emotion), there are no objective universal identities, essences or…
