Agnes Moors (2022), Demystifying Emotions: A Typology of Theories in Psychology and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press — DOI-10.1017/9781107588882
Key takeaways
Registered, not read beyond the front matter. From the blurb, preface and contents:
- Two aims (preface, pp. xiii–xiv). The first is to compare the major theories “in a systematic manner with the help of tools from philosophy of science”. The second is to propose a skeptical theory of the phenomena called emotions. Moors says her thinking “culminated in the recently developed goal-directed theory”. One element in the shift was “my own lab’s failures to empirically confirm hypotheses of appraisal theories about the influence of appraisals on action tendencies” (p. xiv).
- Where the theory is (p. xv). “Chapter 7 (“Response Evaluation Theories”) is dedicated to response evaluation theories, in particular my own version of them, the goal-directed theory.” The list of figures places “Goal-directed theory” at p. 216 and “Hierarchy of goal-directed cycles” at p. 219. Box 7.1 treats emotion regulation.
- The central axis (p. xv). “Box 2.1 pitches the distinction between stimulus-driven and goal-directed processes, which I consider to be one of the central axes on which theories differ.”
- Network theories have their own chapter (Chapter 5, pp. 147–163), so the book should also be checked against Lange et al. 2020 (LIT-1436).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-23 for the novelty check on the record’s proposal that appraisal is the negotiation among perspectives (CLAIM-440). The 2017 article already holds that action selection is a competition among goal-directed processes, settled by expected utility. Whether the book goes further, for instance to competition without a common scale or without a higher-order balancing goal, can only be settled by reading Chapter 7. Until then the record should not claim more novelty than the reading of the article allows.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.