[Aloysius]

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This also reminds me of a psych study that I read once (but no one else ever seems to have heard of it, so I trot it out given any excuse to do so):

They put a woman in the middle of a suspension bridge over a high gorge, then had each participant walk out over the bridge and stand there, swaying over open air, and answer a bunch of questions (dummy questions). Afterwards, someone else asked them to rate the interviewer's attractiveness.

Then they repeated this, but with the female interviewer on a street corner. Same woman, same outfit/clothing, same clipboard of questions...just no bridge in the air. These men rated her lower in attractiveness than the men who'd been on the bridge.

The cognitive psychological explanation was that the men on the bridge had some *unnamed feeling* inside them, and when they (internally, subconsciously) tried to figure out what it was and put it into language and make sense of it, they decided it was interpreted as "physical attraction" to the woman on the bridge. Whereas what the feeling *really* (if that word applies here) was, was "anxiety/fear" from being on the bridge.

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Cool experiment - but it just proves that our judgment / feelings are impacted by our context, no? Because:

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So our feelings exist only insofar as we're able to define them through language. And if we define them incorrectly, that's what they become.

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I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion based on the experiment.

-Al