Essays discussion

This book opens with a possible explanation for Aristotle’s strange truism that animals and children can’t be happy:

The Greeks did not conceive of emotions as internal states of excitation. Rather, the emotions are elicited by our interpretation of the words, acts, and intentions of others, each in its characteristic way…one consequence of this approach is that it is possible to alter people's emotions by changing their way of construing the precipitating event. If I show you that the insult that has made you angry was unintended, or meant something different from what you understood, or that the enemy you fear has no hostile designs on you, I allay your emotional response. Now, this is not something you can do with dogs or infants

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work for children older than infants. Any babysitter worth her salt knows you certainly can rhetorically change children’s emotions and way of construing events. (And I argue you can fool dogs into false expectations. They even "anticipate" naive physics.)