Project description
A closer look at valence asymmetries
In psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, asymmetries between positive and negative valence affect our judgments and language. With this in mind, the ERC-funded Valence Asymmetries project aims to bridge these conceptual gaps. Using methods from philosophy, formal semantics, and experimental psychology, it seeks to highlight valence’s broader role in value judgments and language. It also seeks to unify explanations for diverse asymmetries, and to rationalise valence asymmetries as fundamental cognitive traits. Additionally, the project intends to articulate relationships among valence, value, and polarity, propose a new theory of negation asymmetry, uncover moral asymmetries, and explain valence reversals. This pioneering effort promises insights into how we perceive and communicate value.
Objective
"An asymmetric behavior between the positive and the negative has been evidenced in psychology, for information processing, attention, recognition and decision making, in philosophy, for judgments about morality and intentionality, and in linguistics, for a range of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic phenomena. Negative information grabs our attention, we process it more carefully, we recall it with greater precision. We easily blame others for the negative side-effects of their actions, but do not praise them for the positive ones. It takes many nice words to overthrow one nasty remark. When we say that something is ""not good"", we usually imply that it is bad, but by saying ""not bad"" we do not imply that it is good.
Valence asymmetries have arisen on many horizons but have seldom been brought into correspondence, and are at odds with most theories of value. The present project is a pioneering attempt to secure the premises for a cross-fertilization between the different accounts of valence asymmetries. It will deploy methods from philosophy (argumentation and conceptual analysis), formal semantic and value-theoretic models, and experimental methodology from psycholinguistics and moral psychology.
It has three main objectives:
- highlight the fundamental role that valence plays beyond emotion, in particular, in value judgments and language;
- examine what the different asymmetries have in common, and whether they call for a unified explanation;
- show that valence asymmetries are not necessarily irrational, but often derive from a fundamental asymmetry between positive and negative value, and, as such, are a key component of our cognitive and linguistic architecture.
Furthermore, we will (a) articulate the relationship among the notions of valence, value and polarity; (b) put forward a novel account of the asymmetry of negation; (c) unearth new asymmetries in the realm of morality, virtue and vice; and (d) provide an account of valence reversals."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
08002 Barcelona
Spain