> saying that there is a rationality in emotion misses the point entirely.

I meant a fairly loose sense of 'rationality' as 'appropriateness'. If you feel intense fear because the garden hose moved then there is a sense in which your fear is 'irrational'. If you say that you know the spider can't hurt you but you continue to feel fear there is a sense in which your fear is 'irrational'. We can come to understand why the response is there. The amygdala can't distinguish one coiled object from another, and history of reinforcement can explain phobia, but there still seems to be a sense in which these responses are irrational. Understandable, yes. Rational, no.

> Neither cognitive behaviorists nor evolutionary psychologists can explain, just how it is that we make a choice to do one thing and not another. Cognitive behaviorists don't explain how our mental representations of behavior alternatives cause us to choose one or the other.

Representations (cognitions) aren't thought to be motivational. Desires, preferences, urges, etc are supposed to be motivational. I reccomend Kim Sterelny because he is the world leader in philosophy of biology. While he focuses on beliefs in the first half of "thought in a hostile world' he also considers such dilemmas as 'why does the ant forage?' The behaviorists talked a lot about drives too... About drive reduction. About push me vs pull me theories of motivation. Goal selection is a problem. There is also what is known as the 'frame problem' which is a can of worms. To introduce the frame problem (as simply as possible) how is it that we stop cranking through beliefs and make a selection and act? Some have asserted (Damasio, I think and maybe Le Doux) that emotions are the solution to the frame problem. There hasn't been an adequate account of them as yet, however... Need a theory that is detailed (and clear) enough to be programmed... I just mean to say that while it is true that that whole issue has been passed over for a long time there are theorists currently working on it. There has been a literature accumulating. Beliefs (or representational states) were never meant to be the whole story about action. Motivations (or urges or goals or desires) are indeed meant to be the other half.

There have been experiments as to how emotion affects cognition. Salience is an interesting phenomena. Pop out. Unconscious processing of emotional significance. Intense emotions disrupt cognitive processing. Emotions facilitate memory etc.

> How counterproductive it would be if I dismissed her and told her to come back and talk about those things only after she learns to use the right musicological terms.

I'm sorry - I didn't mean to come across in that way. I just meant that I think there are distinctions that you might be missing. Like how the conversation on free will didn't progress until we had come to a common understanding of 'libertarian' 'compatibilism / incompatibilism' 'determinism' 'natural' 'emergent' etc. One might start out arguing not seeing the distinctions between libertarianism, soft determinism, and hard determinism. But they are distinctions. When you make assertions about whether we have free will or not it is important to be clear on what sort of thing free will is.

I'm understanding you better... And I guess what I want to say is that there is a literature on this stuff. Cognitive psychology text books and neuroscience text books touch on this stuff. People like Le Doux and Damasio have done more work still... And Prinz...

I'm actually writing my thesis on emotion. Aspects in terms of evolution (which I haven't started yet). I've been side tracked into writing on emotional consciousness and the conscious experience of pain and the conscious experince of visual perceptions. Is experiencing fear more like feeling pain or seeing read? How much can representationalist theories of consciousness account for the motivational aspect to conscious experience? IMO not very well... Hence that is what I'm writing on. But I do need to write with reference to stuff that there is a literature on (where people are more likely to be able to understand what I'm saying). Hence... Compare and contrast emotional consicousness with the experince of pain and visual perception.

> If a new idea does challenge one of our existing higher order beliefs, if we decide to accept it (say due to its compelling logical validity) we will have to change many of our lower order beliefs that depend on it. We don't do such things lightly. By the time we are adults, it takes a major life-changing event for us to change any serious higher order beliefs - like a belief (or disbelief) in God for example - but that sometimes happens.

Quine talks about this in the web of belief. Our beliefs are in a network... There are some beliefs that are closest to the periphery (ones formed on the basis of perceptual experiences or 'surface stimulations) and ones that are more toward the centre (the belief that a bachelor is an unmarried man) for example. He thought that in belief revision we revised near the periphery before making changes more in the core (which would entail that we revise a large number of our other beliefs). The principle of conservativism in belief revision is the principle that we should adopt the belief that requires the least pervasive changes throughout the belief network so as to retain consistency.

I did some work on delusions. One theory is that they adopt 'observational adequacy over consevativism' or they accept bottom up perceptual info over top down rationally considered evidence. I focused on... The notion that delusions seem to be responses to certain kinds of anomalous affective experiences and affective experiences can be modular or cognitively inpenitrable (so that fear persists despite the judgement you aren't in danger). Kind of recasting delusions (paradigmatically doxastic - beliefs) as a disorder of affective response rather than cognition.

I think we may be more similar in our thinking...
I also think... That we may be more in line with current work than you think...