Emotions, evidence, and safety
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Emotions, evidence, and safety Christina H. Dietz1 Received: 29 April 2019 / Accepted: 11 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper explores two ways that emotions can facilitate knowledge. First, emotions can play an evidential role with respect to belief formation. Second, emotions can be knowledge-conducive without being evidential by securing the safety of belief. Keywords Emotions · Evidence · Knowledge · Safety
1 Introduction This paper explores two ways that the emotions and their associated feelings can (and often do) facilitate knowledge.1 The positive epistemic contributions of emotion are often neglected within epistemology, perhaps owing to the persistence, in some measure, of Descartes’ recommendation that “when we feel ourselves moved by some passion we suspend our judgment until it is calmed, and do not let ourselves be easily
1 This is not the place to give a definition of what counts as an emotion, or to take sides between the tradition (dating back at least to John Dewey 1894) that construes emotions as a special kind of motivational state, and another which construes them as a special kinds of evaluative attitude (see, for example, Dietz 2020; Nussbaum 2004; and Solomon 2003). For what it is worth, I think of the category of emotion as a potential natural kind for which aprioristic definitions are out of place. (Of course, that category may turn out to comprise a number of disparate natural kinds). By analogy we should not try to define ‘gold’ in advance of empirical investigation. I shall consider both factive emotions such as regret and embarrassment (called factive because in their ‘V that P’ form they function as factive constructions) and epistemic emotions such as being worried that P and being optimistic that P. (The factive/epistemic distinction was introduced by Robert Gordon in The Structure of the Emotions, 1987). I do wish to distinguish emotions from the feelings that they give rise to (see Goldie 2000, Ch. 2 on the distinction between ‘emotions and episodes of emotional experience’), and in this essay I am concerned with the knowledge facilitating role of both. For more recent discussions of this distinction as it applies to the epistemic emotions, see Arango-Munoz and Michaelian (2014).
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Christina H. Dietz [email protected] Dianoia Institute for Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, Australia
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deceived by the false appearance of goods in the world (1991, p. 267)”. I hope to push back against this sentiment. In section one, I present a strong prima facie case for the idea that emotions can play an evidential role with respect to belief formation (and relatedly, for the idea that they can serve as good reasons for beliefs). In this connection, I consider objections raised by Michael Brady (2013) in his extensive critique of the related thesis that emotions can serve as bona fide reasons. Brady’s discussion will be shown to pose no threat to the prima facie case.2 In section two, I explore some ways that the emotions
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