Many of humanity’s deepest conflicts arise from a hidden conceptual failure: in our pursuit of the good life, we rely on mission-critical ideas such as rights, morality, and emotions while neglecting the principles required to define them.
This failure raises questions that modern psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and social theory still struggle to answer:
What, in essence, is an emotion?
Is an emotion fundamentally different from bodily sensation, conscious feeling, physiological affect, or cognitive appraisal? Do we discover emotions in the world as natural kinds, or do we construct them through interpretation and symbolic meaning? Do animals and infants possess emotions, or do they experience affect and feeling without crossing the threshold into emotional meaning itself?
The cost of leaving these questions unresolved is no longer merely philosophical. It appears in billion-dollar industries that claim to detect emotions without first defining them. It appears in clinical systems that confuse affective distress for emotional meaning. It appears in a growing crisis of fragmentation, misinterpretation, and psychological instability across modern life.
In How to Define an Emotion, Cecil “Cézjah” John executes a systematic deconstruction of the academic foundations that have failed to secure emotional meaning. He dismantles the false dichotomy between Classical and Prototype theories of concepts, challenges dominant assumptions in emotional intelligence and emotion detection, and critiques traditional semiotics for failing to adequately govern abstract, mind-dependent meaning.
Drawing from philosophy, psychology, affective neuroscience, computer science, semiotics, and music theory, this work introduces a radically new framework for understanding emotional meaning. Through the Goal-Governed Constraint Model of Concepts, the Constructivist Semiotic Sign, the Constructivist Semiotic Model of Emotions, and the Constructivist Computational Model of Emotions, the book proposes the first formally executable architecture for emotional meaning, integrating philosophical reasoning with the unified modeling language (UML), object-oriented programming, and executable computational structures.
Its central claim is both simple and revolutionary:
Human beings construct emotions by interpreting feelings through context, goals, and symbolic meaning.
Blending philosophy, psychology, affective neuroscience, music theory, computational modeling, semiotic analysis, and formal architecture, How to Define an Emotion reconstructs emotional meaning from the ground up and challenges readers to reconsider one of the most familiar, yet least understood, dimensions of human existence.
The stone the builders accepted has become the weak cornerstone.
This book attempts to rebuild it.