Ineffability

Abstract: It is argued that emotions are lawful phe- nomena and thus can be described in terms of a set of laws of emotion These laws result from the operation of emotion mechanisms that are accessible to intentional control to only a limited extent The law of situational meaning, the law of concern, the law of reality, the laws of change, habituation and comparative feeling, and the law of hedonic asymmetry are proposed to describe emo- tion elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional mo- mentum formulates emotion persistence," the law of closure expresses the modularity of emotion; and the laws of care for consequence, of lightest load, and of greatest gain per- tain to emotion regulation For a long time, emotion was an underprivileged area in psychology It was not regarded as a major area of sci- entific psychological endeavor that seemed to deserve concerted research efforts or receive them Things have changed over the last 10 or so years Emotion has become an important domain with a co- herent body of theory and data It has developed to such an extent that its phenomena can be described in terms of a set of laws, the laws of emotion, that I venture to describe here Formulating a set of laws of emotion implies not only that the study of emotion has developed sufficiently to do so but also that emotional phenomena are indeed lawful It implies that emotions emerge, wax, and wane according to rules in strictly determined fashion To argue this is a secondary objective of this article Emotions are lawful When experiencing emotions, people are subject to laws When filled by emotions, they are manifesting the workings of laws There is a place for obvious a priori reservations here Emotions and feelings are often considered the most idiosyncratic of psychological phenomena, and they sug- gest human freedom at its clearest The mysticism of ineffability and freedom that surrounds emotions may be one reason why the psychology of emotion and feeling has advanced so slowly over the last 100 years This mys- ticism is largely unfounded, and the freedom of feeling is an illusion For one thing, the notion of freedom of feeling runs counter to the traditional wisdom that human beings are enslaved by their passions For another, the laws of emotion may help us to discern that simple, universal, moving forces operate behind the complex, idiosyncratic movements of feeling, in the same way that the erratic path of an ant, to borrow Simon's (1973) well-known parable, manifests the simple structure of a simple ani- mal's mind The word law may give rise to misunderstanding When formulating "'laws" in this article, I am discussing what are primarily empirical regularities These regular- ities--or putative regularities--are, however, assumed to rest on underlying Causal mechanisms that generate them I am suggesting that the laws of emotion are grounded in mechanisms that are not of a voluntary nature and that are only partially under voluntary control Not only emotions obey the laws; we obey them We are subject to our emotions, and we cannot engender emotions at will The laws of emotion that I will discuss are not all equally well established Not all of them originate in solid evidence, nor are all equally supported by it To a large extent, in fact, to list the laws of emotion is to list a pro- gram of research However, the laws provide a coherent picture of emotional responding, which suggests that such a research program might be worthwhile

Abstract: This paper advances the claim that tacit knowledge has been greatly misunderstood in management studies. Nonaka and Takeuchi’s widely adopted interpretation of tacit knowledge as knowledge awaiting “translation” or “conversion” into explicit knowledge is erroneous: contrary to Polanyi’s argument, it ignores the essential ineffability of tacit knowledge. In the paper I show why the idea of focussing on a set of tacitly known particulars and “converting” them into explicit knowledge is unsustainable. However, the ineffability of tacit knowledge does not mean that we cannot discuss the skilled performances in which we are involved. We can discuss them provided we stop insisting on “converting” tacit knowledge and, instead, start recursively drawing our attention to how we draw each other’s attention to things. Instructive forms of talk help us re-orientate ourselves to how we relate to others and the world around us, thus enabling us to talk and act differently. Following Wittgenstein and Shotter, I argue that we can command a clearer view of our skilled performances if we “re-mind” ourselves of how we do things, so that distinctions, which we had previously not noticed, and features, which had previously escaped our attention, may be brought forward. We cannot operationalise tacit knowledge but we can find new ways of talking, fresh forms of interacting and novel ways of distinguishing and connecting. Tacit knowledge cannot be “captured”, “translated”, or “converted” but only displayed and manifested, in what we do. New knowledge comes about not when the tacit becomes explicit, but when our skilled performance is punctuated in new ways through social interaction. Presented to Knowledge Economy and Society Seminar, LSE Department of Information Systems, 14 June 2002

Abstract: Ineffability, the degree to which percepts or concepts resist linguistic coding, is a fairly unexplored nook of cognitive science. Although philosophical preoccupations with qualia or nonconceptual content certainly touch upon the area, there has been little systematic thought and hardly any empirical work in recent years on the subject. We argue that ineffability is an important domain for the cognitive sciences. For examining differential ineffability across the senses may be able to tell us important things about how the mind works, how different modalities talk to one another, and how language does, or does not, interact with other mental faculties.

Abstract: people in this city of New York, those who were born here, those who have recently arrived from other everydays far away, those who have money, those who don't. This would be an obvious point, the founding orientation of a sociology of experience, were it not for the peculiar and unexamined ways by which "the everyday" seems, in the diffuseness of its ineffability, to erase difference in much the same way as modern European-derived notions of the public and the masses do. This apparent erasure suggests the trace of a diffuse commonality in the commonweal so otherwise deeply divided, a commonality that is no doubt used to manipulate consensus but also promises the possibility of other sorts of nonexploitative solidarities which, in order to exist at all, will have to at some point be based on a common sense of the everyday and, what is more, the ability to sense other everydaynesses. But what sort of sense is constitutive of this everydayness? Surely this sense includes much that is not sense so much as sensuousness, an embodied and somewhat automatic "knowledge" that functions like peripheral vision, not studied contemplation, a knowledge that is imageric and sensate rather than ideational and as such not only challenges practically all critical practice across the board of academic disciplines but is a knowledge that lies as much in the objects and spaces of observation as in the body and mind of the observer. What's more, this sense has an activist, constructivist, bent; not so much contemplative as it is caught in media res working on, making anew, amalgamating, acting and reacting. We are thus mindful of Nietzsche's notion of the senses as bound to their object as much as their organs of reception, a fluid bond to be sure in which, as he says, "seeing