This article examines motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning across Chester Himes’ oeuvre as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence. These images reference and reconstruct an event from Himes’ early adulthood: his catastrophic fall down an elevator shaft. Taking a psychoanalytically oriented approach, I analyze the metonymic connections between these motifs, rather than reading them in their chronological order, using Jean Laplanche’s theory of après-coup. I argue that the recursive quality of these images in Himes’ work is not merely (...) an unconscious repetition or conscious working through of a traumatic biographical event but part of an endeavor to imagine different ways to inhabit and survive the structural trauma of Jim Crow America. (shrink)

In this article, our concern is to describe how body(ies) and self are performed in women’s birth narratives through the mediation of a number of significant elements, including technical devices. We will show how, in these narratives, (1) action is distributed among a series of actants, including professionals and technology; (2) that dichotomies appear which cannot be reduced to one of body/mind, but are more adequately described in terms of ‘body-in-labour’/’embodied self’, each of them being locally performed through the mediation (...) of medical practices, knowledge and technologies, the definition of these elements and of their relations being specific to each obstetrical configuration; (3) that part of professionals’ activities is devoted to the detailed management of the articulation between the body-in-labour and the embodied self, and to monitoring their joint transformations. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

The article argues against the common notion ofdisciplinary medical traditions, i.e. Obstetrics, asmacro-structures that quite unilinearily structure thepractices associated with the discipline. It shows that the various existences of Obstetrics, their relations with practices and vice versa, the entities these obstetrical practices render present and related, and the ways they are connected to experiences, are more complex than the unilinear model suggests. What allows participants to go from one topos to another – from Obstetrics to practice, from practice to politics, (...) from politics to experience – is not self-evidently induced by Obstetrics, but needs to be studied as a surprising range of passages that connect (or don't). Techniques and devices to supervise the delivery, to render present the fetus during pregnancy, and to monitoring birth, are described in order to show that such techniques acquire different roles in connecting and creating Obstetrics as a system andobstetrical practices. (shrink)

Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

The acquaintance debate in aesthetics has been traditionally divided between pessimists, who argue that testimony does not provide others with aesthetic knowledge of artworks, and optimists, who hold that acquaintance with an artwork is not a necessary precondition for acquiring aesthetic knowledge. In this paper I propose a reconciliationist solution to the acquaintance debate: while aesthetic knowledge can be had via testimony, aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance with the artwork. I develop this solution by situating it within a virtue aesthetics framework (...) based on Ernest Sosa's virtue epistemology. I go on to apply the solution to the debates on moral testimony and expert testimony. An interesting variant on Gettier cases emerges: cases in which subjects have knowledge, but it has been formed by the wrong competence. (shrink)

Does the scope of beliefs that people can form on the basis of perception remain fixed, or can it be amplified with learning? The answer to this question is important for our understanding of why and when we ought to trust experts, and also for assessing the plausibility of epistemic foundationalism. The empirical study of perceptual expertise suggests that experts can indeed enrich their perceptual experiences through learning. Yet this does not settle the epistemic status of their beliefs. One might (...) hold that the background knowledge of experts is the cause of their enriched perceptual experience – what is known as cognitive permeation – and so their subsequent beliefs are only mediately justified because they are epistemically dependent on this background knowledge. I argue against this view. Perceptual expertise is not the result of cognitive permeation but is rather the result of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning does not involve cognition in a way that entails cognitive permeation. Perceptual expertise thus provides a means of widening the scope of the immediately justified beliefs that experts can form. (shrink)

While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...) favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

For many philosophers, there is a tension inherent to shame as an inward-looking, yet intersubjective, emotion: that between the role of the ashamed self and the part of the shaming Other in pronouncing the judgement of shame. Simply put, the issue is this: either the perspective of the ashamed self takes precedence in autonomously choosing to feel shame, and the necessary role of the audience is overlooked, or else the view of the shaming Other prevails in heteronomously casting the shame, (...) and the ashamed individual’s agency becomes problematically understated. I argue that this debate is fundamentally misguided insofar as it assumes that shame must be exclusively contingent upon either the perspective of the self or that of the Other, when it is in fact dependent upon both at once. This is the “double movement” of shame: an appraisal of the self that is at once social and private. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. (...) We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is ‘all the brain ever does’. (shrink)

By analyzing the discussion on a health forum, we examine how wearing sanitary masks during the Covid-19 pandemic changed people’s lives and what adjustments were required. During our review, we encountered theories referred to by participants as “conspiracy theories” that led to heated exchanges on the forum. Surprisingly, these interactions promoted, rather than prevented, collective exploration and resulted in a rich discussion of the issues related to wearing masks. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we first analyze the (...) dynamics of the discussion, its progression, and the conditions under which it was maintained over time, even given the radical expression of irreconcilable positions. Second, we examine the results of the discussion in terms of describing the problems triggered by the mask and the different authorities on which these descriptions were based. We conclude that the boundaries between science and non-science were occasionally blurred because of the wavering of scientific authorities and the uncertainty of the questions related to the pandemic, rather than because of a generalized distrust of science. We recognize that paradoxically, “conspiracist” theories contribute to the production of knowledge and that the adherence to these theories may stem more from the personal experiences of the individuals who profess them, rather than from the contaminating power of conspiracy theories. (shrink)

Les collectifs constitués sur l'internet interviennent-ils dans la cité ? Existe-t-il des mécanismes qui permettent de passer des interactions électroniques à des interventions perçues comme émanant d'un groupe ? En prenant comme terrain d'étude des listes de discussion par mail sur des thématiques liées à la santé et au handicap, on verra émerger trois niveaux d'action collective : les actions individuelles qui visent à des formes de reconnaissance collective ; l'agrégation d'actions individuelles, en particulier à travers des outils de représentation (...) propres à chaque liste ; la structuration en collectifs actifs dans l'espace politique. (shrink)

Les collectifs constitués sur l'interner interviennent-ils dans la cité? Existe-t-il des mécanismes qui permettent de passer des interactions électroniques à des interventions perçues comme émanant d'un groupe? En prenant comme terrain d'étude des listes de discussion par mail sur des thématiques liées à la santé et au handicap, on verra émerger trois niveaux d'action collective: les actions individuelles qui visent à des formes de reconnaissance collective; l'agrégation d'actions individuelles, en particulier à travers des outils de représentation propres à chaque liste; (...) la structuration en collectifs actifs dans l'espace politiqueLes collectifs constitués sur l'interner interviennent-ils dans la cité? Existe-t-il des mécanismes qui permettent de passer des interactions électroniques à des interventions perçues comme émanant d'un groupe? En prenant comme terrain d'étude des listes de discussion par mail sur des thématiques liées à la santé et au handicap, on verra émerger trois niveaux d'action collective: les actions individuelles qui visent à des formes de reconnaissance collective; l'agrégation d'actions individuelles, en particulier à travers des outils de représentation propres à chaque liste; la structuration en collectifs actifs dans l'espace politique.The group made the intern do they operate in the city? Are there mechanisms to pass electronic interactions interventions perceived by a group? Taking as a field of study discussion lists by email on topics related to health and disability, we will identify three levels of collective action: individual actions aimed at forms of collective recognition, aggregation of individual actions, particularly through representation tools specific to each list in structuring collective assets in space politiqueLes collective formed on the intern they intervene in the city? Are there mechanisms to pass electronic interactions interventions perceived by a group? Taking as a field of study discussion lists by email on topics related to health and disability, we will identify three levels of collective action: individual actions aimed at forms of collective recognition, aggregation of individual actions, particularly through representation tools specific to each list in structuring collective active in the political arena. (shrink)

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

How do institutions respond to expert contests over epistemologies of sex and gender? In this article, I consider how epistemological ascendancy in debates over the regulation of women athletes with high testosterone is established within a legal setting. Approaching regulation as an institutional act that defines forms of embodied difference, the legitimacy of which may be called into question, I show how sexed bodies are enacted through and as part of determinations of expertise. I focus on proceedings from 2015 when (...) the Court of Arbitration for Sport was asked to decide whether an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, could compete as a female athlete. Despite acknowledging that sexed bodies are unruly, the court ultimately endorsed the use of testosterone as seemingly essential to women’s athletic performance, thereby reasserting a two-category model of biological difference. The legitimacy of these regulatory efforts was established through the concurrent narrowing of expertise and the body, a process that is also revealed to be gendered. (shrink)

Can compensation repair the moral harm of a previous wrongful act? On the one hand, some define the very function of compensation as one of restoring the moral balance. On the other hand, the dominant view on compensation is that it is insufficient to fully repair moral harm unless accompanied by an act of punishment or apology. In this paper, I seek to investigate the maximal potential of compensation. Central to my argument is a distinction between apologetic compensation and non-apologetic (...) compensation. Apologetic compensation, I argue, is an act that expresses regret and apology by means of some offer of money, goods, or services. Non-apologetic compensation is an act that seeks to restore loss or harm without expressing regret or apology. In the paper, I defend the view that acts of compensation can be apologetic and argue that such apologetic compensation is sufficient for moral repair. (shrink)

The notion that shame is a global emotion, one which takes the whole self as its focus, has long enjoyed a near consensus in both the psychological and philosophical literature. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have questioned this conventional wisdom: on their view, most everyday instances of shame are not global, but are instead limited to a specific aspect of one’s identity. I argue that this objection stems from an overemphasis on the cognitive dimension of shame. Its proponents cannot (...) make sense of global shame because they only understand the emotion in terms of an intellectual self-evaluation, where I am ashamed upon assessing myself to have disappointed a particular standard or ideal. However, when shame is understood as arising early on in life from one’s threatened connection with others, and as having affective, embodied, and unconscious aspects alongside its later cognitive ones, the intuition that it feels all-encompassing makes more sense. Our earliest experiences of shame, which are largely devoid of complex cognitive content, are global because they are experienced as casting doubt upon our lovability in general. It is only later, as cognition develops, that we learn to hang this sense of overall defectiveness, which is reawakened in subsequent shame experiences, onto specific parts of the self. While this might lead us in adulthood to intellectually understand our shame as having a local basis, such as a failed norm or ideal, its global phenomenology will remain. (shrink)

How one should respond to shame is a moral consideration that has figured relatively little in philosophical discourse. Recent psychological insights tell us that, at its core, shame reflects an unfulfilled need for emotional connection. As such, it often results in psychological and moral damage—harm which, I argue, renders shaming practices very difficult to justify. Following this, I posit that a morally preferable response to shame is one that successfully addresses and dispels the emotion. To this end, I critique two (...) common responses to shame, compliance and anger, and then propose an alternative: the practice of emotional vulnerability. (shrink)

This chapter addresses a general question: What is responsible risking? It explores the notion of "responsible risking" as a thick moral concept, and it argues that the notion can be given moral content that could be action-guiding and add an important tool to our moral toolbox. To impose risks responsibly, on this view, is to take on responsibility in a good way. A core part of responsible risking, this chapter argues, is some version of a Forethought Condition. Such a condition (...) requires us to not make decisions or plans such that we could not deliver on our responsibility obligations. This chapter argues that three moral obligations can be derived from descriptive notions of responsibility. They are (1) the control condition, (2) the responsibility to fix condition, and (3) the responsibility to explain condition. The idea is that in order to impose risks responsibly we ought not act in ways that undermine our ability to remain in control over the risks, undermine our ability to sort out negative outcomes by reparations or compensation, or undermine our prospects of providing an explanation for our actions that also makes sense in hindsight and to those affected. This idea is then tried out on the case of germline gene editing. It is argued that such a moral notion of responsibility is also action-guiding when we do not know for certain what is the morally right or obligatory action all-things-considered due to epistemic gaps. (shrink)

The phenomenal character of a perceptual experience describes ‘what it is like’ for an agent undergoing it. This is a familiar notion when it comes to our sensory states. Recently, there has been increased discussion about how certain cognitive states can also have phenomenal characters. A further, more interesting question asks what links, if any, might between what the phenomenal character of a mental state and when that mental state is considered rational. I will assume that some cognitive states can (...) have phenomenal characters and will focus on a prominent phenomenal feature of a particular cognitive state: namely, deliberation over how to act. I aim to expose one way in which we can describe the phenomenology of deliberating, as well as its potential link to the rationality of deliberation. (shrink)

This article offers an account of organizational change to explain why women leaders are underrepresented compared to women athletes in many sports organizations. I distinguish between accommodation and transformation as forms of change: the former includes women without challenging binary constructions of gender, the latter transforms an organization’s gendered logic. Through a case study of the International Olympic Committee from 1967-1995, I trace how the organization came to define gender equity primarily in terms of accommodating women’s segregated athletic participation. Key (...) to this was the construction of women’s bodies as athletically able but inferior to men, an arrangement formalized in codified rules and procedures and legitimized by external stakeholders. Defined in these terms, gender equity did little to transform the organization’s binary and hierarchically gendered logic, which continued to shape the informal norms and procedures associated with the organization’s allegedly gender-neutral and meritocratic yet male-dominated leadership. I argue that the exclusion of women from ostensibly gender-integrated leadership positions allows organizations to avoid revealing gender similarity between men and women. This maintains a logic underpinned by notions of binary gender difference and masculine superiority. (shrink)

This article addresses dilemmas of agency for feminism through reflections on social psychological research on the role of representations in the construction of identity by Muslim women. Engaging first with Saba Mahmood’s account of religious subjectivities in Politics of Piety, the author argues that feminist research requires a social conception of agency that addresses dialogical dynamics of representation and identity. Drawing on research concerning veiling and identity among Muslim women in the UK and Denmark, the author shows how a social (...) conception of agency may be elaborated through the analysis of how competing representations of gender are negotiated in the self–other encounter. The author argues that a dialogical approach to researching identity in context defies blunt political judgement while shedding light on the intersecting socio-cultural forces and relations of power that engage processes of resistance and re-presentation. (shrink)

What kind of moral principle could be sufficiently restrictive to avoid the kind of large-scale risks that have resulted in catastrophe in the past, while at the same time not be so restrictive as to halt desirable progress? Is there such a principle that is not merely a precautionary principle, but one that could be based on firm moral grounds? In this article, I set out to explore a simple idea: might it be the case that reparability could serve as (...) a moral constraint against risky policy decisions? The idea is simple, but comes in two forms. First, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for harm that is, in principle, irreparable, such that it would bring about a permanent loss of a kind qua kind. Second, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for a reparable (but not compensable) harm that exceeds what realistically could be repaired. I set out here to do two things. First, I describe the moral problem to be addressed for any principle-guiding decisions about risk. A central claim in this article is that risk decisions are epistemically impaired decisions, and that we must, alongside outcome uncertainty, also take both epistemic uncertainty and moral uncertainty into account. Second, I introduce the idea of reparability as a moral constraint in the form of two versions of the Reparability Principle. Such a principle, I argue, could have some interesting advantages that seem both morally intuitive and that come with some advantages against some of the epistemic challenges posed by risk impositions. (shrink)

This paper extends previous attempts at understanding the nature of organizational integrity and its increasingly important role for companies which, after all, bear a moral and societal responsibility. Interpretations of organizational integrity in business ethics literature incorporate aspects ranging from the behavior of managers and employees to corporate structures and incentive systems. We argue that virtue ethics builds an indispensable framework for understanding the origin of the concept of integrity and transfer these findings to an organizational level. Hence, we first (...) define organizational integrity, and second operationalize it in a closed three-step process, consisting of morally sound corporate commitments, their transparent institutionalization within the company, and their implementation into actions. We consider the main goal of organizational integrity to be of a preventative investment nature. Organizational integrity is a company investment that translates into avoiding fines for potential violations of the law or ethical missteps, as well as an investment in the company’s reputation. In turn, organizational integrity can protect a company from disruptions that can threaten its existence. Defining and operationalizing the concept of organizational integrity provides the foundation for future scientific research and the basis for developing practical guidance for organizations and managers. (shrink)

Despite signifying a negative self-appraisal, shame has traditionally been thought by philosophers to entail the presence of self-respect in the individual. On this account, shame is occasioned by one’s failure to live up to certain self-standards—in displaying less worth than one thought one had—and this moves one to hide or otherwise inhibit oneself in an effort to protect one’s self-worth. In this paper, I argue against the notion that only self-respecting individuals can experience shame. Contrary to the idea that shame (...) presupposes the presence of self-worth, I contend that shame merely requires that one have the desire, rather than the expectation, that one is worthy. Furthermore, I suggest that the desire for concealment fueled by shame is not an inherently self-protective mechanism but can alternatively be understood as an effort to safeguard one’s connection with others. (shrink)

Data visualization researchers and designers have explored a range of approaches to ensure that non-expert audiences understand and derive value from their work. Using anthropomorphized data graphics—or anthropographics—is one strategy that can help create a connection between data and audiences. Anthropographics have been defined as “visualizations that represent data about people in a way that is intended to promote prosocial feelings or prosocial behavior.” However, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, anthropographics were used in data visualizations that had an expanded range of (...) rhetorical goals beyond promoting prosocial feelings and behavior—for instance, informing people about the pandemic, persuading them to adopt certain behaviors, or memorializing those killed by the virus. In particular, anthropographics were used in visualized simulations to model possible futures for audiences, showing the spread and impact of the virus in various scenarios. These simulations used anthropomorphizing strategies in text as well as in graphics, along with interactive options that enabled audiences to explore personal connections with the data. As demonstrated through a close reading of several of these COVID-19 simulations, anthropographics can be viewed holistically as a design strategy that incorporates text and interactivity as well as graphical marks in representing data. Findings from this analysis suggest several additions to the design space for anthropographics. (shrink)

Attempts to engineer a generally intelligent artificial agent have yet to meet with success, largely due to the (intercontext) frame problem. Given that humans are able to solve this problem on a daily basis, one strategy for making progress in AI is to look for disanalogies between humans and computers that might account for the difference. It has become popular to appeal to the emotions as the means by which the frame problem is solved in human agents. The purpose of (...) this paper is to evaluate the tenability of this proposal, with a primary focus on Dylan Evans’ search hypothesis and Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. I will argue that while the emotions plausibly help solve the intracontext frame problem, they do not function to solve or help solve the intercontext frame problem, as they are themselves subject to contextual variability. (shrink)