Life, emotion and meaning

a reflection in light of Jordan Zlatev's biocultural theory

Abstract

In this essay, we explore the theme of emotions within Jordan Zlatev's (2002) biocultural theory of meaning, situating it in the context of contemporary discussions on emotions and their relationship with cognition and language (e.g., Scherer, 2005; Frijda and Scherer, 2008; Maturana, 2002; Cavalcante and Militão, 2016). According to Zlatev, meaning is a relationship the organism establishes with its environment, determined by the value it assigns to the stimuli it receives. Thus, meaning is understood to stem from life, but also, for the human organism, from cultural experiences. Within this theoretical framework, we explore the role of emotions in sense-making processes and reflect on how human beings ascribe meaning to their qualitative emotional experiences and encode them in language. In the reflections we undertake here, the affective biological dimension of human experience proves to be as indispensable to contemporary semantic studies as systemic, social, and cultural factors.