Emotions and the Action Analogy: Prospects for an Agential Theory of Emotions

Abstract

According to the action analogy, emotions and actions have certain structural and normative similarities that no theory of emotions should ignore. The action analogy has recently been used in an objection against the so-called perceptual theory of emotions, often defended by means of an analogy between emotion and perception. Beyond the dialectical significance of the action analogy, one might wonder whether it can support a picture of emotions as fundamentally action-like—what I call an agential theory. This article is a first step in answering this question. After discussing various ways to formulate the agential theory, I sketch a version of it.