The claim
CLAIM-440’s clause 3: “Intensity is the potential’s strength. How much of what the other perspectives would decide the potential ranking overrides.” Its own body records the difficulty and leaves it there: “Carver (2003, LIT-1445, unread) is reported to hold that positive affect lowers a goal’s priority, freeing attention for something else. If so, strong positive affect would go with weakening potential, not strong. Until that paper is read, this clause is held for negative valence only. Hesp et al. (LIT-1468, NOTE-1111) cut against it there too: in their model negative valence is a weakening of the preference ordering’s precision, with a fall back to habit (p. 420), though their fear case, confident flight, fits this clause better. The clause is open for both signs.”
The objection states that as a counter. In Hesp et al.’s deep active inference, affective charge updates the expected precision γ of the action model, and negative valence lowers it; with γ low, the agent’s choices are governed less by its preferences and more by habit, so the more negative the valence, the less the decisions follow the ordering. That is the reverse of the clause for negative valence. Carver’s reported view, if the paper bears it out, gives the reverse for positive valence.
CLAIM-438 already objects to CLAIM-440, on different grounds: the ordering that wins the negotiation tracks ‘wanting’, not ‘liking’. That is about which regime the account describes. This is about what its intensity is, and holds even of motivational valence.
What it does not say
- That Hesp et al.’s model is right about organisms. It is a model of a T-maze rat, read in NOTE-1111.
- Carver’s view, at first hand. Carver 2003 (LIT-1445) is still unread. Its thesis is read as Carver’s group restates it (Fulford et al. 2010, LIT-1860, p. 1021): positive affect “may mean that the goal to which it relates can assume a lower priority”. The evidence for the positive half is in the note of 2026-10-30 below.
- That intensity is unrelated to the ordering. Confident flight in fear is a case where strong negative valence and a strong hold go together, as the clause says. The objection is that the relation can run either way, so the clause needs a condition.
Note of 2026-10-30: the positive half, read
Three papers read on 2026-10-30 bear on the positive half. Fulford et al. (LIT-1860, NOTE-1442) restate Carver 2003’s thesis, which confirms the attribution, and find less effort on a goal after progress beyond expectation, without measuring affect. Orehek et al. (LIT-1854, NOTE-1450) find that induced positive affect lowered a promised goal’s activation and the intention to pursue it when competing goals were salient, and raised both when none were: the relation runs either way, as this claim says, and the condition is competition among goals. Thürmer, Scheier and Carver (LIT-1878, NOTE-1438) find that feedback putting one goal ahead moved performance to its rival, and that a plan to ignore one’s feelings removed the effect; but ahead-of-target feedback did not raise mood (their Table 1: −0.09 and −0.06, against −0.04 in the control), so the affect in that path is not shown to be positive. None of the three measured graded affect, so they bear on positive valence against neutral, not on intensity within a sign.
Note of 2026-10-30: what holds it back
The positive half is now read, and holds where goals compete (Orehek et al.). What is unanswered is whether a goal whose priority falls under positive affect shows a weaker hold of the prevailing ordering, or that ordering moving effort to the goal furthest behind, which is how Carver’s satisficing account reads the shift (Fulford et al., p. 1021), and which CLAIM-505 presses as an objection. The claim does not argue the first, and until it does its positive half shows a goal losing priority, not the ordering losing its hold.