This paper considers the sorts of evaluations that underlie the emotion of embarrassment, by questioning what unifies the various kinds of situations in which this emotion typically arises. It examines the difference between embarrassment and shame, and then addresses problems with the accounts of embarrassment proposed by previous authors, in particular Solomon, Taylor and Goffman. It proposes a new model, on which the emotion involves viewing an interpersonal situation, in which you are involved, as containing an exposure (...) to which you are averse. This may either be your own exposure to others, or others' exposure to yourself. The emotion thus reflects the value we attach to placing limits on the sorts of interactions and contact we have with other people. (shrink)

The distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures is due to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict. The moral education of the youth in a shame culture will involve a multitude of prescriptions determining how to conduct oneself. Heroic societies with a closed aristocratic warrior class are typically shame cultures. The form of the dominant norms of a guilt culture is the imperative or dominative tense, which determines what one is obligated to do. This is the typical form of the obligation‐imposing commandments (...) of God. A primary focus of shame in the emerging guilt culture became sexuality and the body, and shame became forcefully riveted to the notion of sin. Feeling shame, like feeling pride, lies at the centre of a ramifying cluster of emotions and emotional attitudes. Shame bears a kinship to embarrassment. Embarrassment is distinguished from feeling shame in so far as it is essentially an audience‐involving emotion. (shrink)

The first section of this paper briefly summarizes my positive view of global helping traits. The remaining sections then develop the view in two new directions by examining the relationship between guilt, embarrassment, and helping behavior. It turns out that guilt and embarrassment reliably and cross-situationally enhance helping behavior, but in such a way that is incompatible with the nature of compassion as traditionally understood.

“Double-halfers” think that throughout the Sleeping Beauty Problem, Beauty should keep her credence that a fair coin flip came up heads equal to 1/2. I introduce a new wrinkle to the problem that shows even double-halfers can't keep Beauty's credences equal to the objective chances for all coin-flip propositions. This leaves no way to deny that self-locating information generates an unexpected kind of inadmissible evidence.

Consumers often feel embarrassed when buying products like condoms, hemorrhoid cream, and beriberi cream in crowded pharmacies. There is an interesting phenomenon in life: Some beriberi creams use the images of a “real foot”, while others use the images of a “cartoon foot.” Imagine if a young woman needed to go to a retail store for beriberi cream that would embarrass her, she would choose a “real foot image” or a “cartoon foot image” beriberi cream? It has been shown that (...) the embarrassment of these products has a strong negative impact on consumer buying behavior. Previous researches have explored how changing packaging elements of embarrassing products can effectively reduce consumer embarrassment. However, few have examined the impact of different image types of embarrassing product packaging with embarrassment. Therefore, this research explores the effect of image types on consumers’ willingness to purchase embarrassing products and reveals the mechanisms of the underlying effects. The results show that natural images can lead to lower purchase intention of embarrassing products when the advertisement uses first-person pronouns due to the mediating role played by negative body imagery. However, there is no significant difference in purchase intention between different image types in the third-person pronouns. Finally, this paper discusses its contributions and limitations. (shrink)

In a recent special issue dedicated to Dani Rodrik’s (2015) influential monograph Economics Rules, Grüne-Yanoff and Marchionni (2018) raise a potentially damning problem for Rodrik’s suggestion that progress in economics should be understood and measured laterally, by a continuous expansion of new models. They argue that this could lead to an “embarrassment of riches”, i.e. the rapid expansion of our model library to such an extent that we become unable to choose between the available models, and thus needs to (...) be solved to make ‘model pluralism’ viable. Drawing on Veit’s (2019a) ‘model pluralism’ account, this paper argues that model pluralism as a thesis about the relationship between science and nature undermines the very idea of a general model selection framework for policy making. (shrink)

Emotions are in as a philosophical topic. Yet the recent literature is bent on grand theorizing rather than attempting to explore particular emotions and their roles in our lives. In this paper, I aim to remedy this situation a little by exploring the emotion of embarrassment. First, I critically examine R.C. Solomon’s conceptual sketch and try to distinguish “embarrassment” from “shame”, “humiliation” and “being amused”. Secondly, I argue that “private embarrassment” is a coherent and useful idea and (...) social scientists and philosophers who dismiss it as unintelligible are mistaken. Thirdly, I discuss the question why is embarrassment (unlike other emotions) catching. Fourth, I make the heretical suggestion that doing philosophy is essentially embarrassing for Socratic interlocutors. Throughout the paper there is a discussion of possible links between embarrassment and loss of self-esteem. (shrink)

The sheer number of theories of consciousness, an abundance that may be unprecedented in the history of science, suggests a profound problem in this domain. This paper attempts to pinpoint the source of the difficulty, beyond the obvious complications associated with explaining the presence of mind in a world of matter. In particular, the argument is put forth that consciousness, when viewed as a binary category with respect to state or content, will of necessity engender compatibility with any number of (...) possible hypotheses. Moreover, it will be difficult to distinguish between these competing accounts, especially when they differ in type as well as in form. To remedy this, it is suggested that a bolder approach is needed, and one in which the proposed theory is consistent with a more traditional scientific template; that is, one that describes more precisely how some aspect of consciousness varies as the underlying variables change. Theories of this type will be more easily falsified, and thus the pantheon of competing accounts can be winnowed more readily. The paper concludes with an example of such a theory in the domain of colour perception, demonstrating that it is indeed possible to make strong claims in spite of the difficulties attending this field. (shrink)

Emotions are in as a philosophical topic. Yet the recent literature is bent on grand theorizing rather than attempting to explore particular emotions and their roles in our lives. In this paper, I aim to remedy this situation a little by exploring the emotion of embarrassment. First, I critically examine R.C. Solomon’s conceptual sketch and try to distinguish “embarrassment” from “shame”, “humiliation” and “being amused”. Secondly, I argue that “private embarrassment” is a coherent and useful idea and (...) social scientists and philosophers who dismiss it as unintelligible are mistaken. Thirdly, I discuss the question why is embarrassment (unlike other emotions) catching. Fourth, I make the heretical suggestion that doing philosophy is essentially embarrassing for Socratic interlocutors. Throughout the paper there is a discussion of possible links between embarrassment and loss of self-esteem. (shrink)

Experimental results in Ultimatum, Trust and Social Dilemma games have been interpreted as showing that individuals are, by and large, not driven by selfish motives. But we do not need experiments to know that. In our view, what the experiments show is that the typical economic auxiliary hypothesis of non-tuism should not be generalized to other contexts. Indeed, we know that when the experimental situation is framed as a market interaction, participants will be more inclined to keep more money, share (...) less, and disregard other participants’ welfare [Hoffman et al., 1994]. When the same game is framed as a fair division one, participants overall show a much greater concern for the other parties’ interests. The data thus indicate that the context of an interaction is of paramount importance in eliciting different motives. The challenge then is to model utility functions that are general enough to subsume a variety of motives and specific enough to allow for meaningful, interesting predictions to be made. For the sake of simplicity (and brevity), in what follows we will concentrate upon the results of experiments that show what appears to be individuals’ disposition to behave in a fair manner in a variety of circumstances [Camerer, 2003]., though what we are saying can be easily applied to other research areas. Such experimental results have been variously interpreted, each interpretation being accompanied by a specific utility function. We shall consider three such functions and the underlying interpretations that support them, and assess each one on the basis of what they claim to be able to explain and predict. (shrink)

Neo-Fregeans argue that substantial mathematics can be derived from a priori abstraction principles, Hume's Principle connecting numerical identities with one:one correspondences being a prominent example. The embarrassment of riches objection is that there is a plurality of consistent but pairwise inconsistent abstraction principles, thus not all consistent abstractions can be true. This paper considers and criticizes various further criteria on acceptable abstractions proposed by Wright settling on another one—stability—as the best bet for neo-Fregeans. However, an analogue of the (...) class='Hi'>embarrassment of riches objection resurfaces in the metatheory and I conclude by arguing that the neo-Fregean program, at least insofar as it includes a platonistic ontology, is fatally wounded by it. (shrink)

“Double-halfers” think that throughout the Sleeping Beauty Scenario, Beauty ought to maintain a credence of 1/2 in the proposition that the fair coin toss governing the experimental protocol comes up heads. Titelbaum (2012) introduces a novel variation on the standard scenario, one involving an additional coin toss, and claims that the double-halfer is committed to the absurd and embarrassing result that Beauty’s credence in an indexical proposition concerning the outcome of a future fair coin toss is not 1/2. I argue (...) that there is no reason to regard the credence required by the double-halfer as any less acceptable than the one deemed required by Titelbaum. (shrink)

Standard objections to dualism focus on problems of individuation: what, in the absence of matter, serves to diversify immaterial items? and interaction: how can material and immaterial elements causally affect one another? Given certain ways of conceiving mental phenomena and causation, it is not obvious that one cannot reply to these objections. However, a different kind of difficulty comes into view when one considers the question of the origin of the mental. Here attention is directed upon the case of intentionality. (...) It might seem that the transition between non-intentional and intentional phenomena could be dealt with by adopting a version of Dennett's discharging strategy, but this is argued against. Several responses to the origination problem are identified, including a creationist one. (shrink)

Questions about the relation between shame and embarrassment are often posed in discussion of emotion but have rarely been examined at length. In this study I assemble and examine distinctions that have been proposed in the literature with the aim of identifying the criteria that have been used to differentiate shame and embarrassment. Relevant empirical studies are also reviewed. Despite the attention paid to the question of the difference between shame and embarrassment consensus on differentiating criteria has (...) not been reached nor has there been consideration of what kind of question is being posed. Three positions that have been adopted are identified and critically evaluated. (shrink)

Animal ethicists have been debating the morality of speciesism for over forty years. Despite rather persuasive arguments against this form of discrimination, many philosophers continue to assign humans a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. The primary source of evidence for this position is our intuition that humans’ interests matter more than the similar interests of other animals. And it must be acknowledged that this intuition is both powerful and widespread. But should we trust it for all that? The present (...) paper defends a negative answer to that question, based on a debunking argument. The intuitive belief that humans matter more than other animals is unjustified because it results from an epistemically defective process. It is largely shaped by tribalism, our tendency to favor ingroup members as opposed to outgroup members. And this influence is distortive for two reasons. First, tribalism evolved for reasons unrelated to moral truths; hence, it would at best produce true moral beliefs accidentally. Second, tribalism generates a vast quantity of false moral beliefs, starting with racist beliefs. Once this intuition is discarded, little evidence remains that speciesism is morally acceptable. (shrink)

The experience of embarrassment was explored in two experiments comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers from cultures varying in the degree of elabo- ration of the embarrassment lexicon. In Experiment 1, narratives in English or Korean depicting three types of embarrassing predicaments were to be rated on their embarrassability and humorousness by Korean-English bilinguals, Korean monolinguals, and Euro-American monolinguals. All groups judged certain predicaments (involving social gaffes) to be the most embarrassing. However, significant group and language differences occurred in (...) judgments of the inten- sity of embarrassment and amusement judgments evoked. Euro-Americans ex- hibited higher overall levels of amusement than the two Korean groups who, in turn, reported higher levels of embarrassment, particularly for certain predica- ment types and contexts (ingroup members present). Further, for the bilinguals, inept performance predicaments in English were judged more embarrassing than those in Korean, whereas all predicament types were judged more amusing when framed with English emotion labels. Bilinguals also appeared to show a heightened embarrassability relative to both monolingual groups. Experiment 2 found lexical selection differences in open-ended responses to embarrassing predicaments depicted in each language, with Euro-Americans preferring to give justifications or use humor to minimize the embarrassment and Korean-English bilinguals preferring to give apologies or say nothing. The findings are interpret- ed to reflect the influence of culturally-mediated schemas guiding the activation and processing of emotion vocabulary. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dialectic as "Philosophical Embarrassment":Heidegger's Critique of Plato's MethodFrancisco Gonzalez (bio)Philosophie ist ein Ringen um die Methode.(GA58, 228)Hans-Georg Gadamer has expressed the following debt to the thought of Martin Heidegger: "The philosophical stimuli I received from Heidegger led me more and more into the realm of dialectic, Plato's as well as Hegel's."1 It is therefore surprising to discover that Heidegger himself did not see his thought as leading him (...) into the realm of dialectic. On the contrary, in Being and Time we find a curt and unexplained dismissal of dialectic, specifically Plato's, as a "genuine philosophical embarrassment" (Verlegenheit).2 This dismissal is repeated in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics course of WS 1929/30 where Heidegger asserts that "all dialectic in philosophy," and thus that of Hegel as well as Plato, "is only the expression of an embarrassment."3 Only with the publication of Heidegger's earlier lecture courses from the 1920s, are we in a position to understand and evaluate this surprising dismissal. We are also in a better position to understand why even the later Heidegger failed to reassess his rejection of dialectic, despite the existence of strong incentives for doing so: incentives recognized not only by Heidegger's students but, as will be shown, by Heidegger himself. What will emerge are not only the oft-observed limitations of Heidegger as an interpreter of Plato, but also, and more importantly, their source in certain limitations of Heidegger's own thinking. [End Page 361]1. Heidegger's Critique of Dialectic in the 1920sHeidegger's most detailed account of Plato's dialectic, and thus the one that best explains his curt dismissal of dialectic in later works, is to be found in the Sophist lectures of 1924/25.4 This account begins with a description of the pervasiveness and potential obstructiveness of. Though ordinarily and most immediately pervades all forms of disclosing (GA19, 196), "[a]ccording to its original sense and original facticity, is not at all disclosing (aufdeckend), but is, if one may speak in an extreme way, precisely concealing (verdeckend)" (197).5 In other words, is initially and for the most part "idle talk" (Gerede), the kind of speech that is bandied about concerning anything whatsoever and that "has the facticity of not allowing the things themselves to be seen, but producing instead a self-satisfaction in resting content with what 'one says'" (197). Thus speech at first presents itself as self-sufficient and autonomous; one hangs onto what is said without being directed beyond it to the things themselves.This tendency of to conceal is a theme to which Heidegger returns repeatedly in the courses of the 1920s. In a course from WS 1923/24 he argues that deception has its origin in the very facticity of language.6 In the unpublished course from SS 1924 ("Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie"), the one that immediately preceded the Sophist lectures, Heidegger characterizes language as the proper domain of "Das Man" (18, 22) and describes the dominance of as leading to Gerede (7, 112).7 Heidegger therefore claims that because the Greeks lived in speech they were also imprisoned by it, with the result that a tremendous effort was needed for them to overcome their imprisonment and thus make science possible (41, 106 ).In the Sophist lectures, Heidegger assigns to dialectic an important role in this effort. Given both the pervasiveness and the concealing character of, philosophy, in its attempt to disclose the things themselves, must both begin with and break through it by means of a "speaking for and against" (Für- und Gegensprechen) that destroys the autonomy and self-sufficiency that has in Gerede and in this way "leads more and more to the matter under discussion and lets it be seen" (GA19, 197). What is needed, in short, is dia-lectic: a speaking that passes through speech.Already, however, one can see the tension that characterizes dialectic on Heidegger's account. Though dialectic is a, a speaking, it seeks to be more. Its aim is to disclose the things themselves of which it speaks, to see these things in a "pure seeing" uncontaminated by the... (shrink)

Extensively investigated in the field of psychology, psychiatry, education, and social policy, self-esteem has been comparatively under-researched in philosophy. However, a number of theories and notions relevant to the understanding of self-esteem and related experiences have been put forward in both classical and contemporary phenomenology of emotion. Drawing upon this body of research, in this chapter I will present a phenomenological account of self-esteem. First, I will suggest that this is best understood as a particular kind of background affective orientation, (...) and, more specifically, as a narratively shaped “existential feeling”. I will then move to explore the relevance of such an account for the philosophical understanding of pride, embarrassment, and shyness, thus providing an example of the influence exerted by self-esteem on other self-related affects and traits. (shrink)

This article suggests that there are intrinsic links between humour and embarrassment and that both are crucial for the maintenance of social life. Goffman and others have claimed that embarrassment plays a key role in the maintenance of social order. However, it is argued that Goffman overlooked the role of ridicule in embarrassment. In consequence, he formulated a `nice-guy' theory of embarrassment, suggesting that onlookers empathize with the embarrassment of others and seek to diminish that (...) embarrassment. By contrast, it is suggested that the embarrassment of others is often a matter of laughter and enjoyment. Such a link between embarrassment and humour is crucial for the socialization of embarrassment, which depends on the possibility of ridicule. This is illustrated by an incident in Freud's classic case-history of Little Hans. The transformation of embarrassing incidents into humorous narrations is also discussed. It is suggested that the link between humour and embarrassment is theoretically significant, pointing the way to a reconstituted Freudian view for understanding the relations between the individual and social order. (shrink)

Facial blushing involves a reddening of the face elicited in situations involving unwanted social attention. Such situations include being caught committing a social transgression, which is typical...

Media, police, and educational responses to nonconsensual pornography (i.e. ‘revenge porn’) have been critiqued for relying on sex negative beliefs that result in victims of this act being blamed and shamed for their own victimisation. In this article I analyse judicial discourse in nonconsensual pornography case law to assess the extent to which sex negativity is embedded in legal responses. I find that, while overt victim blaming and shaming is not present in the judicial discourse, subtle forms of sex negativity (...) are expressed in a minority of cases through references to consensual youth image sharing as inappropriate and through the framing of reputational harms. I argue that it is essential for legal responses to not only avoid sex negative narratives (as most currently do) but to actively reveal and counter the sex negative beliefs that underlie many of the harms associated with nonconsensual pornography. (shrink)

In 1817, the German botanist Ludolph Christian Treviranus (1779–1864), while working on cytoplasmic streaming, exclaimed “What a matter for new observations and what an expectation for a more profo...

In his 2009 PSA Recent Ph.D. Award winning contribution to the bi-annual PSA Conference at Pittsburgh in 2008, C. Wu ̈thrich mounted an argument against struc- turalism about space-time in the context of the General Theory of Relativity, to the effect that structuralists cannot discern space-time points. An “abysmal embarrass- ment” for the structuralist, Wu ̈thrich judged. Wu ̈thrich’s characterisation of space-time structuralism is however incorrect. We demonstrate how, on the basis of a correct char- acterisation of space-time structuralism, it (...) is possible to discern space-time points in the GTR-structures under consideration. Thus Wu ̈thrich’s argument crumbles. (shrink)

Alberic of Paris put forward an argument, ‘the most embarrassing of all twelfth-century arguments’ according to Christopher Martin, which shows that the connexive principles contradict some other logical principles that have become deeply entrenched in our most widely accepted logical theories. Building upon some of Everett Nelson’s ideas, we will show that the steps in Alberic of Paris’ argument that should be rejected are precisely the ones that presuppose the validity of schemas that are nowadays taken as some of the (...) most trivial logical truths: (A∧B) → A and (A∧B) → B, i.e. Simplification. (shrink)