How do we know that we are in a deep disagreement – i.e. disagreement irresolvable by rational means? Some suggest, we know that only after trying out all our rational arguments. However, such strategy risks backfiring by polarizing the parties. This paper proposes an alternative way of recognizing depth. Drawing on epistemic capacity of emotions, I argue that debater’s emotional experience during deep disagreement, namely frustration, functions as an indicator of the disagreement’s depth. Résumé: Comment savons-nous que nous sommes (...) en profond désaccord, c'est-à-dire insoluble par des moyens rationnels? Certains suggèrent que nous ne le savons qu'après avoir présenté tous nos arguments rationnels. Cependant, une telle stratégie risque de se retourner contre nous en polarisant les parties. Cet article propose une autre façon de reconnaître la profondeur du désaccord. En m'appuyant sur la capacité épistémique des émotions, je soutiens que l'expérience émotionnelle du débatteur lors d'un profond désaccord, à savoir la frustration, fonctionne comme un indicateur de la profondeur du désaccord. (shrink)

Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked (...) by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new category of linguistic harm: that of illocutionary frustration. I argue against Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton’s notion of illocutionary silencing by challenging their claim that silencing occurs when there is a lack of uptake of the speaker’s illocutionary act. I look at two scenarios that their view treats differently and argue that these scenarios warrant the same kind of analysis; Hornsby and Langton’s notion of silencing can’t capture the purported difference they want it to (...) capture. I propose that we should look instead to standing to explain the phenomenon that illocutionary silencing intends to explain. I explicate the role of standing in terms of illocutionary frustration, then consider street harassment as an example of a linguistic interaction that is best explained by my proposed view. (shrink)

This paper develops a hybridization of Newcomb’s Problem and the Frustrater (Spencer and Wells’s 2019 paper ‘Why take both boxes?’), underscoring how difficult it is to reconcile the rationality of taking both boxes in Newcomb’s Problem and the rationality of taking the envelope in the Frustrater.

I argue that four-dimensionalism and the desire satisfaction account of well-being are incompatible. For every person whose desires are satisfied, there will be many shorter-lived individuals (‘person-stages’ or ‘subpersons’) who share the person’s desires but who do not exist long enough to see those desires satisfied; not only this, but in many cases their desires are frustrated so that the desires of the beings in whom they are embedded as proper temporal parts may be fulfilled. I call this the frustrating (...) problem for four-dimensionalism. In the first half of the paper I lay the groundwork for understanding the frustrating problem, and then in the second half, I will examine six possible responses to the frustrating problem on behalf of the four-dimensionalist, (i) the Parfit (1984) inspired claim that identity is not what matters, (ii) the personal pronoun revisionism of Noonan (2010), (iii) the indirect concern account of Hudson (2001), (iv) the sensible stages account of Lewis (1986), (v) a multiple-concepts account of desire satisfaction, and (vi) a No Desire View according to which subpersons have no mental states and thus no desires to frustrate. I argue that none of these solutions will help the four-dimensionalist; she does better to reject the desire satisfaction theory, while the defender of the desire satisfaction theory does better to reject four-dimensionalism. (shrink)

Frustration in traffic is one of the causes of aggressive driving. Knowledge whether a driver is frustrated may be utilized by future advanced driver assistance systems to counteract this source of crashes. One possibility to achieve this is to automatically recognize facial expressions of drivers. However, only little is known about the facial expressions of frustrated drivers. Here, we report the results of a driving simulator study investigating the facial muscle activity that comes along with frustration. Twenty-eight participants (...) were video-taped during frustrated and non-frustrated driving situations. Their facial muscle activity was manually coded according to the Facial Action Coding System. Participants showed significantly more facial muscle activity in the mouth region. Thus, recording facial muscle behavior potentially provides traffic researchers and assistance system developers with the possibility to recognize frustration while driving. (shrink)

Frustration is widely recognised to be central to many cases of moral anger in a political context, yet little philosophical attention has been paid to it. In this paper, I offer a much-needed philosophical analysis of frustration, working primarily with the example of the recent South African student protests. By developing a deeper philosophical understanding of frustration and its connections to moral anger, I argue that the movement between the two has a couple of important aspects. First, (...) the movement involves a transformation from simply responding to some opposition to viewing that opposition as wrongfully imposed by an agent; second, in the cases that are my focus, the movement is a response to a persistent opposition that is compounded by an erosion of trust, confidence and hope within a moral community, which ultimately changes the very nature of the opposition into a form of wrongdoing. These aspects allow us to assess the appropriateness of the movement, thereby developing a rich analysis of moral anger arising out of frustration in a political context. (shrink)

Many individuals experience frustration with their work. In some cases, this is because an individual learns that the industry in which she finds herself is simply not for her, and that, if she were starting out again, she’d choose to do something very different with her time. These are instances of what economists tend to call ‘job lock’ and situations that psychologists tend to refer to in terms of individuals being ‘stuck at work’. Our aim in this paper is (...) to explore some of the moral dimensions of this important but neglected set of cases, in which individuals feel trapped in their current line of work. Our headline conclusion is that some of the complaints to which these concerns give rise are valid and weighty ones, and that, consequently, governments have a duty to lower the social and economic costs of switching careers. Finally, we comment explicitly on the implications of our arguments for firms, arguing that, under a range of plausible circumstances, they too have a moral duty to lower the social and economic costs of switching careers, which we can conceive of as part of the demands of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

To construct a synthetic cell we need to understand the rules that permit life. A central idea in modern biology is that in addition to the four entities making reality, matter, energy, space and time, a fifth one, information, plays a central role. As a consequence of this central importance of the management of information, the bacterial cell is organised as a Turing machine, where the machine, with its compartments defining an inside and an outside and its metabolism, reads and (...) expresses the genetic program carried by the genome. This highly abstract organisation is implemented using concrete objects and dynamics, and this is at the cost of repeated incompatibilities (frustration), which need to be sorted out by appropriate «patches». After describing the organisation of the genome into the paleome (sustaining and propagating life) and the cenome (permitting life in context), we describe some chemical hurdles that the cell as to cope with, ending with the specific case of the methionine salvage pathway. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a speech act analysis of microaggressions. After adopting a notion of microaggressions found in the political philosophy literature, I provide an account of both the illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects of microaggressions. I show that there are two parts to microaggressions’ illocutionary force: (i) the general Austinian linguistic conventions; (ii) socio-political conventions that change the speech act into a microaggression. Despite the varied speech acts that can count as microaggressions, I identify a unique perlocutionary effect (...) common to all, perlocutionary frustration, in which the recipient of a microaggression is frustrated or inhibited from addressing the harms that microaggressions cause. The recipient is not necessarily silenced insofar as they are prevented from performing certain illocutionary acts. Instead, the illocutionary acts do not have their intended perlocutionary effects. (shrink)

In this paper, we considered several variants of the internal-external principle (IEP), and showed that each was susceptible to counterexamples. In the final section of the paper, we showed that our weakening of IEP has significant implications for the wrongness of interferences in the Practical Cases. We showed that on Conditionalized Autonomy Variant, many instances of the Practical Cases do not have special wrongness. Those who hold that interferences in these Practical Cases are particularly morally problematic even when the altered (...) desires are all-things-considered disvaluable should either provide a different explanation for the wrongness of these interferences, or give up the view that these interferences are in one respect more pro tanto wrong than the external frustration of the same desires. (shrink)

It is noted that in the modern world one feels an existential frustration that is caused by the absence of a sense of being. It is indicated that satisfaction of human needs does not save one from a feeling of the absurdity of being. It is also proved that a modern person needs a positive example to follow because this person does not have an opportunity to overthink a fast flow of social and individual time. A task of promotion (...) of humanistic innovations for the sake of maintaining the integrity and of harmonious unity of a human, society and nature is worth emphasizing. In conclusion, the main attention is focused on the ideological and humanistic innovations in a sense-bearing role in the socio-political, economical, scientific and technical spheres of the society. Key words : human, existential frustration, sense of the life, the meaning of being, humanistic innovation. (shrink)

For philosophers who would think “with” religion, rather than simply to theorize “about” it, the question of the relationship between religious imagination and philosophical rationality is a matter of constitutive importance. The way we answer this question would have far reaching implications for how we understand the work we do as philosophers who take religion seriously, and how we situate ourselves within broader academic contexts. Indeed, the answer to such a question –insofar as we can give any sort of definitive (...) answer to it –would convey us to the core of what it means for us to “philosophically” appropriate religious and theological materials. We could do worse, I think, than to phrase the question in these terms: do religious imaginaries –representations, narratives, gestures, sacraments, etc. –anticipate a pure, conceptual reflexivity, or do they represent the impossibility of such a standpoint? This question is not only constitutive for philosophical reflection on religion. It is of a more general, formal relevance as well; it effectively raises the additional question as to whether the limits of conceptuality can themselves be conceptually articulated or whether they must be representationally displayed in such a way as to lead thought, obliquely, to an encounter or an experience of its limits. We can distill the question further: does philosophy comprehend religion, or does religion serve to mark the limits of what can be conceptually expressed by philosophy? Is religion the scene of the concept’s satisfaction? Its infinite longing? Or its transcendental frustration? (shrink)

In this paper I convey a recurring problem and possible solution that arose during my doctoral research on the topic of cross-cultural Holocaust curriculum development for Latvian schools. Specifically, as I devised the methodology for my research, I experienced a number of frustrations concerning the issue of transferability and the limitations of both reader generalizability and grounded theory. Ultimately, I found a more appropriate goal for the external applicability of this and other highly contextual research studies in the form of (...) "grounded understandings," which are tentative apprehensions of the importance or significance of phenomena and conceptualizations that hold meaning and explanatory power, but are only embryonic in their potential to generate theory. (shrink)

Many of our endeavors -- be it personal or communal, technological or artistic -- aim at eradicating all traces of dissatisfaction from our daily lives. They seek to cure us of our discontent in order to deliver us a fuller and flourishing existence. But what if ubiquitous pleasure and instant fulfilment make our lives worse, not better? What if discontent isn't an obstacle to the good life but one of its essential ingredients? In Propelled, Andreas Elpidorou makes a lively case (...) for the value of discontent and illustrates how boredom, frustration, and anticipation are good for us. Weaving together stories from sources as wide-ranging as classical literature, social and cognitive psychology, philosophy, art, and video games, Elpidorou shows that these psychological states aren't unpleasant accidents of our lives. Rather, they illuminate our desires and expectations, inform us when we find ourselves stuck in unpleasant and unfulfilling situations, and motivate us to furnish our lives with meaning, interest, and value. Boredom, frustration, and anticipation aren't obstacles to our goals--they are our guides, propelling us into lives that are truly our own. (shrink)

To realize a successful and collaborative interaction between human and robots remains a big challenge. Emotional reactions of the user provide crucial information for a successful interaction. These reactions carry key factors to prevent errors and fatal bidirectional misunderstanding. In cases where human–machine interaction does not proceed as expected, negative emotions, like frustration, can arise. Therefore, it is important to identify frustration in a human–machine interaction and to investigate its impact on other influencing factors such as dominance, sense (...) of control and task performance. This paper presents a study that investigates a close cooperative work situation between human and robot, and explore the influence frustration has on the interaction. The task for the participants was to hand over colored balls to two different robot systems (an anthropomorphic robot and a robotic arm). The robot systems had to throw the balls into appropriate baskets. The coordination between human and robot was controlled by various gestures and words by means of trial and error. Participants were divided into two groups, a frustration- (FRUST) and a no frustration- (NOFRUST) group. Frustration was induced by the behavior of the robotic systems which made errors during the ball handover. Subjective and objective methods were used. The sample size of participants wasN= 30 and the study was conducted in a between-subject design. Results show clear differences in perceived frustration in the two condition groups and different behavioral interactions were shown by the participants. Furthermore, frustration has a negative influence on interaction factors such as dominance and sense of control. The study provides important information concerning the influence of frustration on human–robot interaction (HRI) for the requirements of a successful, natural, and social HRI. The results (qualitative and quantitative) are discussed in favor of how a successful und effortless interaction between human and robot can be realized and what relevant factors, like appearance of the robot and influence of frustration on sense of control, have to be regarded. (shrink)

Our aim in this chapter is to draw attention to what we see as a disturbing feature of conciliationist views of disagreement. Roughly put, the trouble is that conciliatory responses to in-group disagreement can lead to the frustration of a group's epistemic priorities: that is, the group's favoured trade-off between the "Jamesian goals" of truth-seeking and error-avoidance. We show how this problem can arise within a simple belief aggregation framework, and draw some general lessons about when the problem is (...) most pronounced. We close with a tentative proposal for how to solve the problem raised without rejecting conciliationism. (shrink)

Even though social scientists continue to discuss the problems posed by self-fulfilling and self-frustrating predictions, philosophers of science have ignored the topic since the 1970s. Back then, the prevailing view was that the methodological problems posed by reflexive predictions are either minor or easily avoided. I believe that this consensus was premature, ultimately relying on an overly narrow understanding of the phenomenon. I present an improved way to understand reflexive predictions (framed in probabilistic terms) and show that, once such predictions (...) are understood this way, the methodological problems they pose may turn out to be neither minor nor easily avoided. (shrink)

Descartes held that it is impossible to make true statements about what we perceive, but I go over alleged cases of illusory experience to show why such a skeptical conclusion (and recourse to God) is overblown. The overreaction, I contend, stems from an insufficient awareness of the habitual expectations brought to any given experience. These expectations manifest themselves in motor terms, as perception constantly prompts and updates an embodied posture of readiness for what might come next. Such habitual anticipations work (...) best when they efface themselves, so it is easy to blame perception when our expectations get frustrated. I illustrate this misdirected blame with the example of a stick partially in water: it is only because we expect the stick to be straight that its appearance as bent is deemed problematic. I thus conclude that, if we factor in the habitual interpretations operative in perception and switch to a processual view that allows practical engagement, we can deflate the worries that led Descartes to rule out perceptual truths. Distancing myself from the naïve “sign” of folk semiotics, my critique draws inspiration from the triadic semiotic model developed in some late medieval schools of Portugal. (shrink)

By synthesizing research from psychology, economics, and philosophy, Propelled criticizes notions of well-being that overly focus on positive emotions and experiences. Against a tradition that has condemned boredom and frustration to be emotional obstacles that hinder human flourishing, Propelled shows that to live a good life we must experience and react appropriately to both. In addition, it argues that we need to anticipate, wait for, and even long for future events. Boredom, frustration, and anticipation are not unpleasant accidents (...) of our lives. Rather, they are vital psychological states that illuminate our desires and expectations, inform us of when we find ourselves stuck in unpleasant and unfulfilling situations, and motivate us to furnish our lives with meaning, interest, and value. (shrink)

A decision problem where Causal Decision Theory (CDT) declines a free $1,000, with the foreseeable effect that the agent is $1,000 poorer, and in no other way better off, than if she had taken the offer.

What is suspense and how is it created? An answer to this question constitutes a theory of suspense. I propose that any theory of suspense needs to be able to account for three curious features: (1) Suspense is seldom felt in our daily lives, but frequently felt in response to works of fiction and other narrative artworks. [Narrative Imbalance] (2) It is widely thought that suspense requires uncertainty, but we often feel suspense in response to narratives when we have knowledge (...) of the outcome. [Paradox of Suspense] (3) The amount of suspense felt in response to a narrative typically diminishes on repeated encounters. [Diminishing Returns] I offer a theory of suspense that can explain these three features. I argue for a theory called the Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense, which holds that suspense results when our desire to effect the outcome of an imminent event is frustrated. (shrink)

That government agencies and public bodies can be liable for damages when they induce and then frustrate people’s legitimate expectations is an important and distinctive feature of administrative law in Europe. This article sets out to establish a set of moral principles and ideals that might justify this legal institution. The notion of security of expectations found in the work of utilitarian writers provides a starting point. Having examined the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, I then turn to consider (...) an alternative argument based on finding a solution to the problem of credible commitments. Finally, I look for suitable moral arguments in the liberal and Kantian political theorising of John Rawls. I argue that if we see the function of the rule of law as not merely to maximise aggregate utility and to make policymakers’ decisions seem credible but also to ensure Justice as Fairness for individuals, then this provides a more robust and satisfactory way to justify the liability of public bodies for legitimate expectations they induce and then frustrate. (shrink)

This article questions a number of widely held views of the role of values in psychotherapy. It begins with a discussion of the now largely discredited view that psychotherapy can be value free. It also broadens this challenge to question the popular idea that values form an inescapable part of the therapeutic encounter. While this view is correct in outline, it is necessary to reject the underlying conception of values as largely arbitrary preferences that the client and the therapist bring (...) to the encounter, as this fails to do justice to the inherently ethical nature of psychotherapy. It argues that we should recover the Greek notion of therapy as essentially concerned with the character of a person. In other words, the goal of therapy is virtue. (shrink)

This chapter combines the insights of Sigmund Freud and Theodor W. Adorno to explain some of the psychoanalytic mechanisms that contributed to a scenario where people voted for a leader who undermines their very existence. Trump successfully exploited the feelings of failure of the millions of Americans who have not lived up to the liberal capitalist ideology of success. By replacing their ego ideal with their leader, Trump voters could get rid of the frustration generated by such an ideology. (...) The people “fell in love” with Trump because he gave them the illusion that they “can become great again.” Moreover, by lifting moral restrictions to being openly classist, racist, and sexist, Trump generated a permanent festival where the American people can feel better than classed, raced, and gendered Others and thus satisfied with themselves again. (shrink)