Rowson, Rebecca Jo; (2023) The role of expression in the perception of emotion. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

One of the problems concerning our knowledge of others’ minds has to do with identifying the source of such knowledge. I defend the idea that, very often, the source is perception. In particular, I argue that the emotions of others are available to the senses in the same way as other everyday objects of perception and that this is possible because of expression. This simple thesis faces the following objection. If our perception of emotion relies on expression, then it must be distinguished from our ordinary perception of everyday objects. Our ordinary perceptual experiences are not mediated by anything analogous to expression, so the objection goes. In this thesis, I seek to understand and respond to this objection by exploring the relationship between emotions and expressions. I propose that there are analogous intermediaries in our ordinary perceptual experiences – we perceive objects through perceptual media like sound and illumination and we perceive events by perceiving the activities that constitute them. Through drawing these comparisons, emotional expression comes to be understood as a fundamentally perceptual phenomenon. In thinking about the role expression plays in our perception of emotion, we in turn shed light on what it is to express emotion.

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