ON THE EMBODIED AND ADAPTIVE ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPTS GOOD AND BAD
Bogusław Bierwiaczonek
Słowa kluczowe:
embodiment, evaluation, adaptive concepts, pain, pleasure, emotion, affective predication, value predication, hierarchy of values, profilingAbstrakt
This paper in an attempt to explain the bodily motivation of the basic evaluative terms GOOD and BAD in terms of human experiences (sensations) of pain and pleasure, based on the findings and theory of human emotions and feelings proposed by A. Damasio (1999). It is argued that the concepts GOOD and BAD may belong to a larger category of “basic adaptive concepts”, which developed from basic human needs and adaptations. The basic evaluative opposition GOOD – BAD is shown to be one of the crucial parameters of the domains of human emotions and values, which constitute two bases of evaluative predications, called, respectively, affective and value predicates. It is suggested that the domain of values has the structure of a hierarchy of values with each value represented as a scale showing bi-polar valences and their intensities.
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