Barrett's theory has absolutely nothing to do with the mere act of labelling sensations. It's not about saying "this is not 'anger', this is 'anger'" - She's arguing, in her 2006 paper, (very convincingly from an evidential point of view) that there is no such state as 'anger'. If you looked for evidence of such a state in the brain you will fail to find any such thing. Same goes for all the other emotions. Likewise if you look for such a state psychologically, all you will find is a collection of behaviours no core of which can be demonstrated to be necessary, no single one of which sufficient.

In her 2017 paper she uses modern theories of computational neuroscience (active inference) to posit a possible means by which we come to categorise certain disparate and dissimilar collections of perception and interoception in the same class.

As @StreetlightX says in the OP, this has many interesting implications - it does for psychology no less, but the matter of whether she's right in the first instance shouldn't really be up for debate here. The question she's answering is the question of how we come to categorise disparate sensations in the same class. The fact the we do this from a neuroscientific point of view is relatively indisputable (at least not disputable without reference to neurological evidence of emotional states having some unified and identifiable correlates in the brain).

Her model might be wrong, but the need for an explanatory model is a live issue in both neuroscience and psychology, it's not a superficial re-branding.

She's arguing, in her 2006 paper, (very convincingly from an evidential point of view) that there is no such state as 'anger'. — Isaac

I might prefer to say something like: there are many states called anger, each of them variantly evoked and produced across a range of different situations.

She's arguing, in her 2006 paper, (very convincingly from an evidential point of view) that there is no such state as 'anger'. If you looked for evidence of such a state in the brain you will fail to find any such thing. — Isaac

Philosophy strikes again!

I might prefer to say something like: there are many states called anger, each of them variantly evoked and produced across a range of different situations. — StreetlightX

Yes, that's a better way of putting it from our (phenomenological?, never sure how to use that word properly) perspective.

From a neuroscience perspective, I think the current thinking (Sapolsky, Seth, LeDoux...) is that the collection of these states has no (or little) neurological significance, as a group. By which I mean constituent states (affects, perceptions... ) which form part of one of the experienced states called 'anger' have no more connections with each other than they do with constituent states typically associated with other emotional classes. Does that make sense?

I realise that position doesn’t really have much use here where we're talking about the consequences for us as we experience these things though. Just thought it might help underline the force behind Barrett's position.



It's not really philosophy. In order to be useful a class has to be such that it's members have some usefully distinguishing characteristics that are not shared in equal significance with similar members of other classes.

All that's happened here is we started investigating models of brain function using the classes given to us by our experience and we found them to be not so useful because we couldn't isolate any characteristics which uniquely identify members of that class. I'm not sure how they might better have proceeded, given the evidence they had.

From a neuroscience perspective, I think the current thinking (Sapolsky, Seth, LeDoux...) is that the collection of these states has no (or little) neurological significance, as a group. By which I mean constituent states (affects, perceptions... ) which form part of one of the experienced states called 'anger' have no more connections with each other than they do with constituent states typically associated with other emotional classes. Does that make sense? — Isaac

Yeah it does - anger is a kind of nominal melting pot: we put various ingredients in, and you get a family resemblance of results (called 'anger'), but no specific ingredient is necessary. I also wouldn't worry about Snakes too much. He's doesn't have anything of interest to say.

I wanna share what I think to be Feldman Barret's positive account from the paper "The Emotion Paradox", rather than dealing with the details of the evidence she presents for it.

Emotions are interoceptions. They are the body's perception of itself (through some modalities, like "somatovisceral information"). That means what we leverage to explain perception applies to emotion. Perception is task relative; what you see depends upon what you're doing; and mediated by a bunch of things. Your past experiences, what you've learned, how you conceptualise stuff. What you've learned influences what you see, what you're doing influences what you see, how you talk about what you see influences what you see. Those effects of "what you've learned", "how you conceptualise stuff" and "what you're doing" get put into the process of valuation.

Valuation is one part of how our bodies do emotions. The other part is core affect. Core affect, inn Barret's words is:

Core affect has been characterized as the constant stream of transient alterations in an organism’s neurophysiological state that represent its immediate relation to the flow of changing events

Core affect (i.e., the neurophysiological state) is available to consciousness and is experienced as feeling good or bad (valence) and to a lesser extent as activated or deactivated (arousal).

Core affect and valuation run in parallel all the time. Insofar as emotion is concerned, we are core affect machines and valuation machines. Valuation draws on resources outside core affect, and it modulates (or mediates) the emerging experience of emotion. The extra resources are anything that we could bring to bear to contextualise information; all these extra resources can be labelled as concepts. They're not only the "clear distinct ideas" of Russel, they're more general representations.

How they work together is that core affect updates its environmental and bodily information quickly, valuation updates itself a bit more slowly. If the environment and the body are food, core affect is chewing, valuation is digestion, emotion is the whole thing insofar as it's bodily.

To be able to label a state of core affect "anger", we have to have the cognitive resources in place not just to categorize it, but to devote enough of our attentional and representational resources to it that that a categorization ("I feel angry") emerges as an individuated description of our emotional state. As Barrett puts it, emotions are "perceptual symbols", like "red".

I argue that the process of categorization is fundamental to both color and person perception
and draw a parallel between these categorization processes and the way in which people use their knowledge of emotion categories to shape an experience of
emotion.

The usual folk psychology ways we talk about emotion are all post categorisation; we have distinct but overlapping (descriptions of) states like happiness, anger, shame, horniness. What we learn about these categorisations, the folk psychology stuff, influences how we feel. This intervention of resources outside core affect upon our emerging experience of emotion through learning simultaneously makes it discursively/culturally mediated and something that can be honed and practiced, a skill. Husserl called phenomenology "relearning how to see", Barrett may suggest that we can relearn how to feel.

The intervention learning has upon the emerging experience of emotion is not limitless; the processes that constitute core affect are linked to how the body is extremely likely to typify its own sensations/state; the body is predisposed to some emotions and responses. There are some biological primitives (central pattern generators) that valuation acts improvisationally upon, draws boundaries between, and leverages contextual information to interpret and prescribe what to do upon their (and core affect's) basis.

The way I've written it above may suggest that core affect and valuation are still reactive; they are means for digestion of environmental stimuli, and this always goes stimulus->response or behaviour->feeling. This isn't true; valuation is predictive/prescriptive, and this is fleshed out in some of her later work. In the paper "The Theory of Constructed Emotions", Barrett leverages Bayesian brain ideas about concepts and perception to refine how emotions are predictive/prescriptive, not simply reactive. Emotion is in some regard anticipated behaviour that is expected to be effective and salient in summarising our body's situation (including current task and goals).

I hypothesize that in assembling populations of predictions, each one having some probability of being the best fit to the current circumstances (i.e., Bayesian priors), the brain is constructing concepts (Barrett, 2017) or what Barsalou refers to as ‘ad hoc’ concepts (Barsalou, 1983, 2003; Barsalou et al., 2003). In the language of the brain, a concept is a group of distributed ‘patterns’ of activity across some population of neurons.

Valuation becomes a patterning of core affect(s); patterning is always going on in the emerging experience of emotion, so it modulates emotion; emotions are a "what's now? what's next" rather than just a "this just happened", and "this just happened" is part of informing "what's now? what next?".

As Barrett puts it:

A brain can be thought of as running an internal model that controls central pattern generators in the service of allostasis (for more on pattern generators, see Burrows, 1996; Sterling and Laughlin, 2015; Swanson, 2000). An internal model runs on past experiences, implemented as concepts. A concept is a collection of embodied, whole brain representations that predict what is about to happen in the sensory environment, what the best action is to deal with impending events, and their consequences for allostasis (the latter is made available to consciousness as affect). Unpredicted information (i.e. prediction error) is encoded and consolidated whenever it is predicted to result in a physiological change in state of perceiver (i.e. whenever it impacts allostasis). Once prediction error is minimized, a prediction becomes a perception or an experience. In doing so, the prediction explains the cause of sensory events and directs action; i.e. it categorizes the sensory event. In this way, the brain uses past experience to construct a categorization [a situated conceptualization; (Barsalou, 1999; Barsalou et al., 2003; Barrett, 2006b; Barrett et al., 2015)] that best fits the situation to guide action. The brain continually constructs concepts and creates categories to identify what the sensory inputs are, infers a causal explanation for what caused them, and drives action plans for what to do about them. When the internal model creates an emotion concept, the eventual categorization results in an instance of emotion.

Summarizing my understanding of this view: there's an interpretive conceptual layer not just through which emotions pass, but which in itself is a structuring element in the production of an emotion, such that emotions can't be considered primarily as biological effects absent of sociocultural context. In fact, sociocultural contexts expressed through individual brains shape the production of emotions (or more accurately, shape biological affects, the precursors of emotions, making these recognizable as such) and, in doing so, draw landscapes of rationality, which we then ironically sequester as conceptual buttresses against emotional impulses. So the folk view of emotion is partly the result of a process in which emotion, as more accurately understood, is always active, and this undermines the folk dichotomy between reason and emotion, concepts and feelings. Evidence from neoroscience lends weight to this view by showing brain activity involved in emotion to be widely distributed across modules traditionally associated with other aspects of cognition.

One might say: the meaning of emotions are their use. — StreetlightX

Or, going on the above, that the meaning of emotions are the context in which they are experienced and there is no clear division possible between "subjective"/internal context and "objective"/external context because the packaging of the raw material of emotion is dependent on both and without it there is no emotional shape definable (with emotional shape being translatable into distinct emotion, anger, sadness etc).

(I see @fdrake has just posted. Going to read that before writing more.)

This discussion's going well. Soon it might obtain to the level of understanding which Plato demonstrated. Emotion was proposed by Plato as the medium between body and mind to solve the commonly cited problem for dualism, of causal interaction.

In Plato's moral philosophy, the emotions, "spirit" or "passion" in common translations, might ally with the mind, controlling the body to act in a reasonable way, but in some cases the mind hasn't the necessary control over the passions, they side with the impulses of the body, causing irrational thinking by the mind, consequently irrational actions.

Plato's proposed State, in The Republic is designed around this three part division of the human being. The rulers are philosophers, applying principles of knowledge in their rule. The Guardians are that medium group represented by emotions, the police, military, enforcing the rule with spirit, ambition, and honour, allied with the rulers. He likens the Guardians to dogs, when they are well trained they obey their master, but if not they will disobey, and even turn against their master. The third group are the skilled workers, providing for the needs of all, we might call them professionals.

He also describes the corruption of the State, through this same comparison of the State to the three parts of human being. It's interesting how he goes both ways in the analogy, taking observation from the State and applying them to the individual, and taking observations of the individual and applying them to the State. This capacity to go both ways demonstrates the accuracy of the analogy. Corruption starts with the medium level, the Guardians, obtaining too much power. Positive emotions, like ambition and spirit are honoured, valued and sought by the philosopher rulers, becoming higher in priority than rational principles. This allows the Guardians who rule by emotion, to overtake the rule of rational philosophical principles. The new rulers, formerly the medium, have no more honour, that being provided for by the philosophical principles of reason, having overthrown that rule. They now start to follow money, the currency of the third group, the professionals. This turns them toward being subservient to that body of professionals, passing the power of rule over to them. This is the end State of corruption, democracy. What follows democracy is tyranny, as an effort to salvage the State from that highly corrupted condition.

Your past experiences, what you've learned, how you conceptualise stuff. What you've learned influences what you see, what you're doing influences what you see, how you talk about what you see influences what you see. Those effects of "what you've learned", "how you conceptualise stuff" and "what you're doing" get put into the process of valuation.

....Husserl called phenomenology "relearning how to see", Barrett may suggest that we can relearn how to feel. — fdrake

One thing that seems quite striking to me is exactly this parallel with phenomenology; just as Husserl gave an account of perception in terms of the 'as-structure' of intentional experience (to see is to see something as something), so too here is there something like an "emoting-as": one emotes-as-anger, emotes-as-frightened, emotes-as-grieving. One of the super interesting things about this particular account however, in a way that Husserl arguably did not, is that it acknowledges that not all emotion conforms to the as-structure. The structure is incredibly leaky and pliable. Affects and unacknowledged emotions circulate beneath the level of explicit emotion (cognitively-recognized emotion), and, as per 'misfelt feelings', there can be all sorts of crossed wires and potentially 'misidentified' and misconstrued feelings.

It instils a kind of gap within the subject in which where what is usually taken to be the most sure thing ("I may not know anything, but I know how I feel") can itself be a source of confusion. This should not of course be surprising - "I don't know how I feel/I feel a mix of emotions" are common experiences. But I really like this kind of 'two-level' (at least) account of emotion that allows for thinking about all kinds of emotional 'pathology' as it were, in which things can go wrong. Which comes back, of course, to your question about transcendental illusions and their applicability to emotion.

Continuing from here.

The titular "Emotion Paradox" from the paper is that:

People are compelled by their own experiences to believe that emotions exist as natural-kind entities, yet a century of research has not produced a strong evidentiary basis for this belief. To date, there is no clear, unambiguous criterion for indicating the presence of anger or sadness or fear.

So there are two thrusts of it: (1) people are compelled by their experiences to believe that emotions exist as natural kind entities (categories of experience, analogising "anger" to "the human leg") but (2) there's no evidence that emotions actually work like that.

The paper addresses this by trying to explain how those beliefs in emotions as discrete/partitioned entity types come about by describing a mechanism of emotion; the categorisation arises as a prediction and contextualisation of one's bodily state in a task which is cognitively, discursively and culturally mediated while weighing all those things in the light of past and current experience.

I imagine it that we have a (pliable, modifiable) emotional vocabulary of concepts that our self models evaluate in terms of (@Isaac, dunno if this is actually a good analogy, you'd definitely know more about it); this is like/is due to/arises from that, most broadly this is associated with that. The "this" and "that" are rarely articulated, due to being fuzzy uncategorised interminglings of all the signals we have in the body and from the environment. Something which someone articulates about their emotional state, then by necessity, must already have been weighed and measured by the process of valuation that mediates these signals and found to be a "best fit" summary of the state (given prior experience).

Edit: regarding the "fuzziness" of the categories; it reads like the process of categorisation is something that's evaluating all the time, categorisation itself isn't an "on/off" thing, or a single step mapping from "fuzzy core affect" to "distinguished emotion", it's that core affect is always more or less categorised; maybe parametrising it or thinking of it in terms of an intensity is helpful; there's a sliding scale from "completely uncategorised" to "completely distinct" that our affect(s) are constantly charted on by the process of valuation; but it's always in this or that category (what box things are put in matters), and categories are learnable.

Categorizing is fundamental cognitive activity. A category is a class of things that are treated as equivalent. To categorize something is to determine what it is, why it is, and what to do with it. A concept can be thought of as a collection of mental representations for
a category that people draw on during the process of categorization. Once conceptual knowledge is brought to bear to categorize something as one kind of thing and not another, the thing becomes meaningful. It then becomes possible to make reasonable inferences about
that thing, predict about how best to act on it, and communicate our experience of the thing to others.

There are inbuilt tendencies in these associations (central pattern generators), I imagine they give rise to whatever cultural universals we have regarding emotion.

The structure is incredibly leaky and pliable. Affects and unacknowledged emotions circulate beneath the level of explicit emotion (cognitively-recognized emotion), and, as per 'misfelt feelings', there can be all sorts of crossed wires and potentially 'misidentified' and misconstrued feelings. — StreetlightX

Yes! One consequence of emotions (the kind of thing we have when we say "I am sad" or whatever) being predictive, task relative, valuations is that they can be wrong, flawed, not fit for purpose. They can be misattributions, inaccurate or mis-focussed summaries of the current bodily state relative to its context(ualised task), we can find the wrong things meaningful (salient), they can suggest ineffective actions - I imagine there are other nuances of the errors we can make in feeling; special emphasis, feeling itself; but I can't think of more now.

Which comes back, of course, to your question about transcendental illusions and their applicability to emotion. — StreetlightX

I'm beginning to think that transcendental illusions are separate in character from the predictive errors spoken about in this approach; insofar as transcendental illusions are necessary failures of reason generated by its misapplication, I don't think they'd apply to the contingent error prone-ness of valuations. I'm not saying that there aren't transcendental illusions for emotion, but I can't see a neat way of linking the paper to the question I wrote to you (summarised: "Are there analogues of transcendental illusions in emotion?").

Emotions like anger are ill-defined, per se, the word wrath is symbolic of an anger-like emote, but does that mean something like anger is nons?

I feel as if the proposal tones down the concept.

I can judge someone less aware than me, as being in a specific emotional state - again - this man is angry.

You're saying or I've misunderstood, that I don't accurately judge a man's anger, using this term 'anger'.

A man is experienced in his mental youth being emotional far easier than a mature man who knows more, hiding such weakness from sense.

You can use an emotional state against another, stronger when angry, weaker when scared, but not all the time.

If I view you crying, I'll assume you're sad - for all I know you may be happy but - you show signs of a person who's sad and I'm now using it advantegously.

Because of this, it's toned down - you propose I can't do this, or we're becoming so knowledgable I'll never sense it. That's, I think, wrong.

A couple of things that might be useful to bear in mind with this stuff.

1.

Our valuation of the interoception/perception of stimuli is not idle journal-writing. The prediction the we vocalise as an emotion category is the attempt to render into language a model of our state which actually has a purpose beyond that report. In the classical model this is already taken care of (the 'emotion' puts the brain in a state better able to carry out the task at hand). With an active inference model though, we have a much more interesting intersection. So our model predicts the cause of our state, but, as with perception, it's a proactive model, it tests the theory by taking action 'as if' it were the case and responding to errors.

In perception, this might take the form of looking for edges or forms we expect to be there (once we've predicted it's a rabbit, we look for the ears).

In affect modelling, we'd be doing something like focusing on our skin response once we've formed a predictive model of fear based on, say, our heart rate. This can extend to external responses too, so that aspects of our environment become brought into focus depending on their role in the whole 'anger' story-line. The emotion is not just felt within our own bodies but is an interactive experience with our environment. Others take part in it.

Evidence for this comes from differential emotional reports in different environments in response to the same stimuli.

(Took me longer to write that than I thought it would... 2. later...)

The paper addresses this by trying to explain how those beliefs in emotions as discrete/partitioned entity types come about by describing a mechanism of emotion; the categorisation arises as a prediction and contextualisation of one's bodily state in a task which is cognitively, discursively and culturally mediated while weighing all those things in the light of past and current experience. — fdrake

An emotion, in its most instinctual form is the most general and vague thing, if it could even be called a thing. It becomes specified and narrowed down through intentional direction. We could take an emotion with much evidence of its nature, like desire, as an example. In it's raw form, something like hunger is a general hollow, empty feeling of discomfort, want. Without knowing the feeling, one would not even recognize the significance of that feeling, as hunger. So to apprehend it we must first narrow down the field, identify this feeling of desire, and recognize this particular type of desire as hunger. In a well cared for society such as ours, many of us might not have ever experienced enough desire to be able to recognize its existence as that hollow empty feeling of want.

In consideration of options to satisfy one's hunger, a person might narrow down the general desire further, directing it toward particular items which might be consumed. There is a force of habit which gets involved here, allowing us to short-circuit, or bypass all that narrowing down. We can get what we need without suffering the emotions because we know that we need it and it's available. But this may result in a craving for a particular type of item under some circumstances, or perhaps even a particular object. This bypass habit which directs the emotions into partitioned types without proceeding through the rational narrowing down process, may be either healthy or unhealthy, as habits can be good or bad.

Dewey doesn't write in a way amenable to skimming for me. — StreetlightX

H.L. Mencken said that Dewey was "the worst writer ever heard of in America." I wouldn't go that far, but he's difficult to read, no doubt about it. He's worth the effort, I think, because he invariably sees us as organisms living in an environment and addresses questions raised from that standpoint, something I find appealing. Larry Hickman is a philosopher who I think is good at clarifying his thought, something not easy to do given Dewey's very dense style.

... Barrett's point about cognitive systems maintaining allostasis is, I think, more than just a neuroscientific one. It emphasises the role of interoception as forward-acting (it generates some following set of reactions, rather than just backward-acting, suppressing existing responses) something else afterwards . So a model, is a kind "this is like/is due to/arises from that" (to borrow @fdrake's expression), but it cannot really be separated from "...and this is what I do about it" because the doing is part of the loop updating the priors.

2.

I think this...

I imagine there are other nuances of the errors we can make in feeling; — fdrake

... is important to understand the implications of this model. One experiment done on generating responses in mice introduced an element of randomness to see if the inference of valence to a Pavlovian response would still confirm to a purely Bayesian model (bit of background, it does without valence, classic experiment on correcting errors in sensory conflict showed the predictions were almost perfectly Bayesian). On this occasion, they didn't. As soon as the expectation had valence the predictive model erred from purely probabilistic. Basically, the mice were reluctant to update their priors to reflect the probabilities they were experiencing when the expectation had valence. The model actually included the valuation of the result.

So with modelling emotion, we're not necessarily just modelling the most likely cause of the stimuli (and appropriate response), we're biasing those models in favour of certain predictions depending on the value we previously gave them. Technically an error. We act as if a particular model is a better explanation than it actually is.

We do not learn emotions as a skill , but we do have the skill to learn how to use emotions , which in itself brings a interesting Question . I become Angry , instinctively , in certain circumstances , yet in certain situations I will use the emotion of anger to get what I want , even when I am not actually angry . The use of sadness emotions to trigger the sympathy of another person is another example . Is this my conscious mind using these tactics , or my sub-conscious mind ? is this what I have learned to do , or was it instinctive ? . We are born with emotions in place , but we learn how to use them for our benefit in life .

I feel I'm in agreement with most of what Barrett says about emotions. There seems to be a hidden logic behind feelings - the "about-ness" you referred to - and, as far as I can tell, it boils down to survival, survival as an individual entity, as a social entity, as the thing one identifies as the self or as a integral part of that self. Emotions, on that view, is the logic of self-preservartion with a scope coextensive with what one thinks of as me and mine. — TheMadFool

It may be more accurate (or merely specific) to say that emotion is the logic of energy regulation, if I follow what you're saying correctly.

Philosophy rarely contains interpretations of dimension reduction techniques applied to psychometrics ; it isn't quite the same game here.



I think your "this is all the same as before" detectors are malfunctioning in this instance. There are predictive differences between the natural kinds view and the one Barrett's proposing, and they are referenced in what we're discussing. It might be the same "explanatory category making" game, but here the explanations do inform what predictions are made about how emotion functions (see the hidden thing * for an example). Experimental results about emotion make more (or less) sense depending on the view's content.

Of course, to both of you, being largely a philosophy discussion, we'll maybe be playing the same game in interpreting the view and relating it to "philosophical positions", but researchers using Barrett's paradigm will make sense of and predict different results than those of (at least some of) the views she's criticising.

... Barrett's point about cognitive systems maintaining allostasis is, I think, more than just a neuroscientific one. It emphasises the role of interoception as forward-acting (it generates some following set of reactions, rather than just backward-acting, suppressing existing responses) something else afterwards . So a model, is a kind "this is like/is due to/arises from that" (to borrow fdrake's expression), but it cannot really be separated from "...and this is what I do about it" because the doing is part of the loop updating the priors. — Isaac

To draw a really special emphasis on this point (which was lacking in how I presented it); the predictions of our self models are also in part proposed interventions; what can I do which is appropriate for my goal and the rest of my current model? It isn't like the whole model is just some epistemic device we use to learn about the world, the model is also sending out things like motor signals; lean closer to hear better, stuff like that. Our behaviour itself, our emotions themselves, are a sample from the model, and "exactly what we do" is a collapsed down form, a representative summary, of the model's state given (its own representation of) a current goal (and our expectations of environmental/bodily behaviours).

Edit: I'm not comfortable enough with the Construction of Emotion paper yet to talk about its mechanics in detail though, so I'm largely improvising in this based on my understanding of the work (in active perception) she's trying to integrate it with.

The trouble I have with this excellent analysis is that I'm not at al sure what a concept is.

So I might just note that concepts, if they are anything, are also action oriented. That is, the meaning of a concept is what you do with it.

It's also interesting that the result of the analysis seems to be the aggrandisement of what might be called the "cultivated soul". If emotions are a learned skill, we can differentiate the emotionally learned from the emotionally unschooled.

And that begins to look like a defence of middle class values; we wouldn't want that, now, would we?

One of the really wild things about this account (for me) is that it can almost be 'translated' point-by-point into a Wittgensteinian account of concept-use in general.

Indeed, much of it sounds like reheated Wittgenstein. Does she acknowledge the influence at least?

If emotions are a learned skill, we can differentiate the emotionally learned from the emotionally unschooled. — Banno

There's a word for that, it's "manners". If you look for it on Wikipedia though, the preferred form is the French "etiquette". I guess we still look up to the French to tell us how to be polite.

It's also interesting that the result of the analysis seems to be the aggrandisement of what might be called the "cultivated soul". If emotions are a learned skill, we can differentiate the emotionally learned from the emotionally unschooled.

And that begins to look like a defence of middle class values; we wouldn't want that, now, would we? — Banno

Ah, but the question is how we treat the distinction; over the kind of power and rhetorical relations we set up in a society where people are differentially emotionally educated. There mere acknowledgement of this is not aggrandisement, no more than acknowledging the existence of the poor and uneducated is aggrandisement - indeed, the lack of acknowledgement would be the ultimate aggrandizing move, on behalf of some fabled 'middle-class' (if of course, 'the middle class' existed - which it doesn't. It's just a feint designed to break the solidarity of the working class, to which almost everyone belongs to).

But to your point of substance...

The trouble I have with this excellent analysis is that I'm not at al sure what a concept is.

So I might just note that concepts, if they are anything, are also action oriented. That is, the meaning of a concept is what you do with it. — Banno

For Barrett at least, a concept is something which categorizes sensations into seemingly discrete emotions (anger, fear, joy, etc). See also @fdrake's post here. The point of this categorisation (forming a 'concept' of anger, fear, joy, etc), is to help the 'body regulate itself, guide action, and guide perception'. More than this, a concept here is a prediction. It is a prediciton in the sense that it says something like: "anger is the best way to respond to this, and the emotion of anger will be the best suited to help me achieve what I want in this situation". To quote Barrett on this:

"Traditionally, a ‘category’ is a population of events or objects that are treated as similar because they all serve a particular goal in some context; a ‘concept’ is the population of representations that correspond to those events or objects. I hypothesize that in assembling populations of predictions, each one having some probability of being the best fit to the current circumstances, the brain is constructing concepts... The brain uses emotion concepts to categorize sensations to construct an instance of emotion.

That is, the brain constructs meaning by correctly anticipating (predicting and adjusting to) incoming sensations. Sensations are categorized so that they are (i) actionable in a situated way and therefore (ii) meaningful, based on past experience. When past experiences of emotion (e.g. happiness) are used to categorize the predicted sensory array and guide action, then one experiences or perceives that emotion (happiness)." — Barrett - The Theory of Constructed Emotion

So you're exactly right - the meaning of a concept is what you do with it; or as I said earlier - the meaning of an emotion (which is a concept!) is what you do with it. The thing to add here however, is the notion that a concept functions predicatively - it has an orienting function, and is constructed on the basis of feedback loops with respect to behaviour.

This... https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712 ?

Yeah that's the one. I can link you a copy if you'd like. That particular one is more brain-sciencey though. The more conceptual paper is her "Solving the Emotion Paradox" paper, which I think can be found with a Google search.

Our behaviour itself, our emotions themselves, are a sample from the model, and "exactly what we do" is a collapsed down form, a representative summary, of the model's state given (its own representation of) a current goal (and our expectations of environmental/bodily behaviours). — fdrake

Yes, that's right. The point I was trying to make above is that making any conceptual/verbal representation of this snapshot summary that we label with an emotional term is also a behaviour. So we're not just journal writing, we're not keeping a log of how we're feeling just for posterity, our drawing together a snapshot valuation of all our various emotion-related stimuli is itself an act which is part of the perceive>infer>respond>perceive(more closely) system. We're deliberately paying more attention to the contributory stimuli and deliberately trying to form a conceptual valuation of them in order to achieve some situational goal.

To put it more colloquially, we're not in some state we would term an emotion all the time (and just unaware of it). The act of terming a state and emotion is something we do in relation to some goal. Up to that point we simply have affect, no emotion at all. It's not something we discover about our state that was there all along, it's something we construct from the components of our state for some other purpose. That where the 'constructed' bit of constructed emotions comes from.

the more conceptual paper is her "Solving the Emotion Paradox" paper, which I think can be found with a Google search. — StreetlightX

Here, save you the trouble of typing it.

Cheers.

Reading.

Indeed, much of it sounds like reheated Wittgenstein. Does she acknowledge the influence at least? — jkg20

Of the three papers I've read, there's only one reference to Wittgenstein in connection with her use of the term 'family resemblance'. That said, this is alot more than reheated Wittgenstein - it elaborates and takes the idea into new and incredibly interesting directions. Thinking about concepts in terms of predictions, and then further linking those predictions in terms of bodily states and environmental feedback along with a whole invocation of Bayesian brains are all major renovations on the idea.

Moreover, I like that similar ideas can be arrived at from totally different paths - it makes an idea more robust, and allows for a greater extension of the concept into new and exciting areas. Also, Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist by profession, so I would not expect that the relevant philosophical literature is necessarily covered.