DeLancey, Craig - Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about the Mind and Artificial Intelligence

There probably is no scientifically appropriate class of things referred to by our term emotion. Such disparate phenomena—fear, guilt, shame, melancholy, and so on—are grouped under this term that it is dubious that they share anything but a family resemblance. But particular emotions are another matter altogether. There is good reason to believe that different sciences can make quite compelling sense of a more fine-grained differentiation of affects. My task in this book is to reveal some of the important and neglected lessons of some of the emotions for the philosophy and sciences of mind, and this task can be accomplished with just a working characterization of a few of these. More important, there is a compelling theory of some emotions that has far-reaching implications for the philosophy and sciences of mind. This is the affect program theory. Using a version of this theory as a guide to what phenomena we will be concerned with and to the nature of these phenomena will allow us to avoid fundamental confusions and to provide richer results.