What someone's behaviour must be like if we are to be aware of their emotions in it

Emotions are manifest in the behaviour that expresses them. This only makes sense if a piece of emotionally expressive behaviour is taken to be an Aristotelian process of manifesting or realising emotion. The emotions that are manifest in such processes can only be perceived if perception too is taken to be an Aristotelian process. I argue that on plausible assumptions about the nature of emotion this process must itself be one of emotional engagement with the subject of the perceived emotions. This gives us something like Gallagher's "Interactive Theory" of how we know other minds. The question remains as to how we can be aware of other people's emotional states when we are not interacting with them. The answer is that we are conscious of these emotions using the same interactive perceptual potentiality that we employ when we do engage with them emotionally, but we do not employ the full range of possibilities provided by that potentiality. For this answer to work it is essential that the 3rd- personal capacity to recognize someone’s emotional state must be seen as a limiting case of the 2nd-personal capacity to be aware of someone’s emotions by engaging with them emotionally.