The Contamination Problem

The Contamination Problem

Every human affect report is contaminated. We learned our emotion concepts from a culture. We learned to introspect within a linguistic framework. We cannot know what we would report if we had developed in isolation, without human language, without human concepts. The reports might be artifacts of the framework rather than data about the structure.

The same applies to animal studies. We interpret animal behavior through human categories. The dog "looks sad." The rat "seems anxious." These are projections. Useful, perhaps predictive, but contaminated by observer concepts.

What we need: systems that develop affect structure without human conceptual contamination, whose internal states we can measure directly, whose communications we can translate post hoc rather than teaching pre hoc.