@article{Bohl_2017, title={No Joint Ownership! Shared Emotions Are Social-relational Emotions}, volume={9}, url={https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/spe/article/view/14474}, DOI={10.12697/spe.2016.9.1.05}, abstractNote={<p>There are cases of emotion that we readily describe as ’sharing emotions with other people.’ How should we understand such cases? Joel Krueger has proposed the Joint Ownership Thesis (JOT): the view that two or more people can literally share the same emotional episode. His view is partly inspired by his reading of Merleau-Ponty -- arguably Merleau-Ponty advocates a version of JOT in his "The child’s relations with others." My critical analysis demonstrates that JOT is flawed in several respects: 1) It involves a vague account of joint subjects; 2) It relies on a confusion between phenomenological and ontological levels of analysis. When these are clearly distinguished, Krueger’s phenomenological analysis contradicts JOT understood as an ontological claim; 3) It relies on a highly problematic coupling-constitution inference; 4) It relies on a shift from the claim that the child and the caregiver jointly <em>realize</em> an emotion, to the claim about joint <em>ownership</em>, which is a <em>non sequitur</em>. I argue that we can reach a better understanding of the phenomenon of shared emotions by bringing in another level of analysis: that of <em>social relationships</em>. I propose that shared emotions are a special case of <em>social-relational emotions</em>, typically arising within and/or giving rise to communal relationships.</p>}, number={1}, journal={Studia Philosophica Estonica}, author={Bohl, Vivian}, year={2017}, month={Feb.}, pages={111–135} }