Creative Coordinations: Theory and Style of Knowledge in P. Dumouchel's Emotions

Abstract

This article is a review of Paul Dumouchel's Emotions which focuses on the two levels of his emotion theory and heuristic. It interprets them both as the expression, in the domain of emotions, of a post-classical conception of nature and science that belongs to the tradition of scientific research on self-organization. Its main thesis, which is also shared by Emotions, is that creativity in nature and science corresponds to a process of coordination.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• emotions
• mirroring mechanisms
• self-organization

This article originally appeared in Italian in “Percorsi creativi e compresenze immaginarie” published by Guaraldi.it.

Notes

1. The article's notes about theory and heuristic of self-organization are taken from a more detailed work dedicated to this topic (cf. Damiano 2008).

2. A significant interest of research on self-organization in relation to emotions dates back approximatively ten years, which is after the first publication of Émotions in 1995 (cf., e.g., Bosma and Saskia Kunnen 2001).

3. Very schematically: mirroring mechanisms functionality implies that, when an individual is observing another individual executing an action or expressing an emotion, in the observing individual fire the same neurons that fire in the active subject of the action or the emotion—that is, the individual observed. This neuronal co-activation is supposed to support the observer's intelligibility of the observed's behavior (cf., e.g., Gallese 2005).