The Emotional Action Analogy

Abstract

I defend that emotions should be elucidated by reference to the kind of actions we do when we experience an emotion, namely, emotional actions. This claim is not trivial, as there are theorists that submit that emotion should be elucidated by reference to sensory perception (Tappolet, 2016) and others by reference to action in general (Naar, 2022). Both views are supported by analogies, given the pretheoretical similarities that we find between, in one case, emotion and sensory perception, and between emotion and action, in the other. Thus, in order to defend my claim, I show why both analogies are problematic. First, there are important disanalogies between emotion and sensory perception and an analogy with action is better (Brady, 2013; Naar, 2022). Second, I point out that the action analogy faces its own problems —as it does not account correctly for the phenomenology of emotion, nor is it able to individuate emotions types from one another (Ballard, 2021). Drawing ideas from the literature of the psychology of human emotional development, I present and defend an analogy between basic emotion and emotional action and, in order to extend it to emotion in general, I suggest a dispositional analysis for non-basic emotions. The resulting view is that non-basic emotions should be understood as dispositions to undergo basic emotions depending on the context, and such basic emotions should be analysed in terms of emotional actions.