2026-10-06T07:57:53Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33869047 2026-09-30T17:55:14Z category_30007 category_30016 category_30391 category_30334 category_30349 item_type_12 month_year_09_2026

The Language of Stress: Example - Glass of Water Joshua Pace (23014183) Philosophy of cognition Philosophy of mind (excl. cognition) Cognitive and computational psychology not elsewhere classified Cognitive neuroscience Biological psychology not elsewhere classified motivation wanting valence alliesthesia incentive salience predictive processing active inference thirst prioritization value philosophy of mind Language of Stress (LoS) <p dir="ltr">An argument that wanting and prioritizing are not two processes but one, developed through the difference between a glass of water you ignore and the same glass when you are thirsty.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Overview</b></p><p dir="ltr">A glass of water sitting on a table across the room is furniture. You would walk past it without registering it. Now imagine you have had nothing to drink all day: the same glass becomes the most important object in the room. Nothing about the water changed.</p><p dir="ltr">The obvious reading is that thirst made the water more salient, and that is true but it is only half of what happened. Two things were magnified, not one. The problem got louder -- the deficit, the discomfort -- and so did the solution. This paper argues that those were not two operations but a single one, and that the distinction matters more than it first appears.</p> 2026-09-30T17:55:14Z Text Preprint 10.6084/m9.figshare.33869047.v6 https://figshare.com/articles/preprint/The_Language_of_Stress_Example_-_Glass_of_Water_Solution_Magnification_v1_0_/33869047 CC BY 4.0