"byzantine" -- from Grice's Dictionary

Agitation. A Byzantine feeling is a Ryleian agitation. . If Grice were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that “to feel Byzantine” is just to have a an anti-rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that Grice is or might *be* Byzantine, it would surely be ridiculous to criticize Grice on the grounds that Grice saddles himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. And why? Well, because, alla Parsons, if a quantifier is covertly involved at all, it will only be a universal quantifier which in such a case as this is more than adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. Grice’s situation vis-a-vis the ‘proposition’ is in no way different. The word ‘emotion’ is used to designate at least three or four different kinds of things, which I shall call ‘inclinations’ (or ‘motives’), ‘moods’, ‘agitations’ (or ‘commotions’) and ‘feelings’. Inclinations and moods, including agitations, are not occurrences and do not therefore take place either publicly or privately. They are propensities, not acts or states. They are, however, propensities of different kinds, and their differences are important. Feelings, on the other hand, are occurrences, but the place that mention of them should take in descriptions of human behaviour is very different from that which the standard theories accord to it. susceptibilities to specific agitations are on the same general footing with inclinations, namely that both are general propensities and not occurrences. Agitations are not motives. But agitations presuppose motives, or rather they presuppose behaviour trends of which motives are for us the most interesting sort. There is however a linguistic matter which is the source of some confusion. There are some words which signify both inclinations and agitations, besides some which never signify anything but agitations, and others again which never signify anything but inclinations. Words like ‘uneasy’, ‘anxious’, ‘distressed’, ‘excited’, ‘startled’ always signify agitations. Phrases like ‘fond of fishing’, ‘keen on gardening’, ‘bent on becoming a bishop’ never signify agitations. But words like ‘love’, ‘want’, ‘desire’, ‘proud’, ‘eager’ and many others stand sometimes for simple inclinations and sometimes for agitations which are resultant upon those inclinations and interferences with the exercise of them. Thus ‘hungry’ in the sense of ‘having a good appetite’ means roughly ‘is eating or would eat heartily and without sauces, etc.’; but this is different from the sense in which a person might be said to be ‘too hungry to concentrate on his work’. Hunger in this second sense is a distress, and requires for its existence the conjunction of an appetite with the inability to eat. Similarly the sense in which a boy is proud of his school is different from the sense in which he is speechless with pride on being unexpectedly given a place in a school team. To remove a possible misapprehension, it must be pointed out that not all agitations are disagreeable. People voluntarily subject themselves to suspense, fatigue, uncertainty, perplexity, fear and surprise in such practices as angling, rowing, travelling, crossword puzzles, rock-climbing and joking. That thrills, raptures, surprise, amusement and relief are agitations is shown by the fact that we can say that someone is too much thrilled, amused or relieved to act, think or talk coherently. It is helpful to notice that, anyhow commonly, the word which completes the phrase ‘pang of . . .’ or ‘chill of . . .’ is the name of an agitation. I shall now argue that feelings are intrinsically connected with agitations and are not intrinsically connected with inclinations, save in so far as inclinations are factors in agitations. But I am not trying to establish a novel psychological hypothesis; I am trying to show only that it is part of the logic of our descriptions of feelings that they are signs of agitations and are not exercises of inclinations. Feelings are not among the sorts of things of which it makes sense to ask from what motives they issue. The same is true, for the same reasons, of other signs of agitations. Feelings, in other words, are not among the sorts of things of which it makes sense to ask from what motives they issue. The same is true, for the same reasons, of the other signs of agitations. This point shows why we were right to suggest above that feelings do not belong directly to simple inclinations. An inclination is a certain sort of proneness or readiness to do certain sorts of things on purpose. These things are therefore describable as being done from that motive. They are the exercises of the disposition that we call ‘a motive’. Feelings are not from motives and are therefore not among the possible exercises of such propensities. The widespread theory that a motive such as vanity, or affection, is in the first instance a disposition to experience certain specific feelings is therefore absurd. There are, of course, tendencies to have feelings; being vertiginous and rheumatic are such tendencies. But we do not try to modify tendencies of these kinds by sermons. What feelings do causally belong to are agitations; they are signs of agitations in the same sort of way as stomach-aches are signs of indigestion. Roughly, we do not, as the prevalent theory holds, act purposively because we experience feelings; we experience feelings, as we wince and shudder, because we are inhibited from acting purposively. Sentimentalists are people who indulge in induced feelings without acknowledging the fictitiousness of their agitations.