“A New Way To Look At Emotions”
“the thought is not that there are no emotions but, rather, that when it comes to these, membership isn’t fixed by the instantiation of one fixed, shared essence common to all, and only, members of the species or the class of emotions. Variation is the norm. And, crucially, this is consistent with there being norms and regularities in the variation that are what justify treating members of the class as members of the class.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance helps here. Members of a family may all look alike without there being one distinct look that each of them has. We have overlapping similarities and differences in appearance here. There are norms in the variation in appearance.”
Related: “What Emotions Are (and Aren’t)”; “The Importance of Naming Your Emotions”
