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<p>We do not only use language to avow our emotions but also to deny having them. Negative avowals – utterances such as “I’m not happy,” “I’m not scared,” or “I’m not angry” – raise an important but neglected question: how can the absence of a mental state be expressed in speech? I argue that negative avowals can, like positive ones, function as explicit expressive acts. This phenomenon, which I call <i>expressive denegation</i>, shows that speakers can make mental state absence itself linguistically manifest. To address the resulting puzzle, I develop propositional expressivism, on which what is expressed is not a mental state but a proposition about the speaker’s mental condition – namely, that she is (not) in the state named. This framework preserves the core insight of avowal expressivism while extending it to negative avowals.</p>

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Expressing the Absence of Emotion

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  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月28日

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  • Nadja-Mira Yolcu

摘要

We do not only use language to avow our emotions but also to deny having them. Negative avowals – utterances such as “I’m not happy,” “I’m not scared,” or “I’m not angry” – raise an important but neglected question: how can the absence of a mental state be expressed in speech? I argue that negative avowals can, like positive ones, function as explicit expressive acts. This phenomenon, which I call expressive denegation, shows that speakers can make mental state absence itself linguistically manifest. To address the resulting puzzle, I develop propositional expressivism, on which what is expressed is not a mental state but a proposition about the speaker’s mental condition – namely, that she is (not) in the state named. This framework preserves the core insight of avowal expressivism while extending it to negative avowals.