A semiotic perspective based on the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce is offered to open up new directions to the current debate over basic emotions. While explaining in a systematic way contested questions such as causal chain, association, and dissociation among the components of emotion, this semiotic analysis suggests that preoccupation with these building blocks type of questions masks and distracts attention from the more global problems that plague affective science-the essentialism

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... at drives the debate, and the tendency to explain behavior in terms of isolated organisms. John Searle is of the opinion that most research on consciousness is taking the "building blocks" approach with corresponding neglect of the "unified fields" question (Faw, 2005) . In the field of emotion research, the same may be said of the multitude of papers generated by the basic emotions debate, including the otherwise rather comprehensive critique by Zachar (2006) . My comments on the basic emotions debate have therefore a twofold purpose and intent: (a) fill a vacuum left by Zachar (2006) , and (b) continue and expand along the lines of pragmatism that Zachar (2006) used productively in his theoretical analysis. More specifically, I approach the larger picture of the debate from the perspective of semiotics as formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of pragmatism. One of the larger issues I focus on concerns the possibility of a paradigm shift in emotion research, a possibility first opened by James Russell's (2003) critique of the basic emotions paradigm. A well known story about another Russell, Bertrand (Bakker, 2008), has it that once when he tried to show the infinite regress involved in traditional cosmology, he posed the question that if we are to believe that the world is carried on the backs of giant turtles, then what carries the turtles, he asked. An old lady in the audience said to him, "Very smart, young man, but this won't do. It's turtles all the way down." As James Russell (2003) points out that emotion is not an "entity" but an \\server05\productn\T\THE\28-2\THE207.txt unknown Seq: 2 5-DEC-08