On Stories Within and Stories Behind Symptoms: Response to colombetti and Stein

摘要

I thank Giovanna Colombetti and Dan Stein for their careful reading and thoughtful comments. Colombetti is right when she suggests that in enactivism there are no 'mere physiological states.' She criticizes the following quotation: "If there is no self-referentiality, even after attempts at clarification, the putative emotion is just a physiological state or a sensation." My formulation, she says, echoes traditional, disembodied cognitivist accounts of emotion, according to which bodily arousal and bodily sensation, without accompanying intentional evaluations and judgments, are mere physiological happenings. Enactivism rejects the dichotomy between cognitive appraisals and bodily arousal.