ADR-014: emotion-and-affect joins the topics

Context

The owner asked for Antonio Damasio’s work to be added to the record. His subject is emotion and feeling: the somatic marker hypothesis, feelings as the experience of the body’s homeostatic state, and feelings as the source of consciousness. The vocabulary had neuroscience, consciousness, cognition and agency, and no word for emotion. Each of those holds part of the subject, and none of them is it.

The gap was older than Damasio. LIT-379, on anger driving the spread of fake news, was filed under social-science and society-and-governance only, though its finding is about an emotion.

On 2026-10-01 the owner asked for one or more tags for emotion and affect.

Decision

Add emotion-and-affect to topics, with a label and a blurb, in the philosophy group. It sits beside consciousness and cognition because it is the same kind of word: a part of the mind that philosophy and the sciences both study. Like cognition, it is about the thing, not about one discipline’s view of it.

The blurb names the bodily basis of feelings, including the homeostatic and interoceptive states they are said to report, so the Damasio works and their neighbours are found under one word.

Retagged: LIT-379 takes emotion-and-affect second, after social-science.

Considered and not retagged:

• LIT-128 (affective fictionalism). It is about reading mental-state attributions as normative evaluations, not about emotion.
• LIT-190 (coherence and fluency). Its “feeling” is the metacognitive feeling of processing fluency, which is its own subject.
• LIT-207 and LIT-212. They mention affective states only in passing, while arguing about something else.

Alternatives

• Two words: emotion-and-affect and homeostasis-and-interoception. Homeostasis is Damasio’s mechanism rather than his subject, and no other work in the record has it as a subject. A word with only one author’s works under it would split them in two, and a reader looking for feelings would have to know the mechanism to find them. Add it when a second line of work needs it.
• Stretch consciousness or cognition. The vocabulary is closed so that every tag is one somebody chose. Reaching for the nearest wrong word is the failure the closure exists to prevent.
• Outside the philosophy group. The group is a label over the words, not a rule (ADR-003), and consciousness and cognition both sit in it.