Conceptualizing Contextual Emotion The Grounds for “Supra-Rationality”

Abstract

Anne:] &dquo;I can't, I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?&dquo; &dquo;I've never been in the depths of despair, so I can't say,&dquo; said Marilla. &dquo;Weren't you? Well did you ever try to imagine you were in the depths of despair?&dquo; &dquo; No, I didn't.&dquo; &dquo;Then I don't think you can understand what it's like. It's a very uncomfortable feeling indeed. When you try to eat a lump comes right up in your throat and you can't swallow anything, not even if it was a chocolate caramel.&dquo; -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables.Emotion, as a &dquo;suprarational&dquo; property, transcends rationality in that it can be thought of as a group, contextual rather than as a solely individual trait, and thus is a higher order property, as the above quote suggests. This proposal arises from a metatheoretical analysis of models available to broach questions of emotion. I use metatheoretical in the sense of both the context of theory production and the theory of theory. From the first arose the idea that emotion, through the use of irrationality, has surfaced as a working equivalent to inexplicability or rational relativity, and can be modelled more adequately as suprarational, with a unique nature in its own right. The latter led me to propose that the concept of emotion as contextual, a higher order group level property, is possible and tentatively profitable.A great deal of attention has been directed toward social factors that shape emotion (Radley 1988, Harre 1986 and towards how talk about emotion is constructed (Scheff 1990), but there has been less interest in conceptualizing emotion itself. Important as these efforts are, they are not enough, because emotion needs to be mod-2015 at Kungl Tekniska Hogskolan / Royal Institute of Technology on July 4, dio.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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