The prospects of emotional dogmatism
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The prospects of emotional dogmatism Eilidh Harrison1
Accepted: 22 September 2020 Ó The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The idea that emotional experience is capable of lending immediate and defeasible justification to evaluative belief has been amassing significant support in recent years. The proposal that it is my anger, say, that justifies my belief that I’ve been wronged putatively provides us with an intuitive and naturalised explanation as to how we receive epistemic justification for a rich catalogue of our evaluative beliefs. However, despite the fact that this justificatory thesis of emotion is fundamentally an epistemological proposal, comparatively little has been done to explicitly isolate what it is about emotions that bestows them with justificatory ability. The purpose of this paper is to provide a novel and thorough analysis into the prospects of phenomenology-based—or dogmatist—views of emotional justification. By surveying and rejecting various instantiations of the emotional dogmatist view, I endeavour to provide an inductive case for the conclusion that emotional phenomenology cannot be the seat of the emotions’ power to immediately justify evaluative belief. Keywords Emotion Phenomenal dogmatism Epistemic justification Seemings Phenomenology
1 Introduction The idea that emotional experience is capable of lending immediate and defeasible justification to evaluative belief has been gaining significant traction in recent years. The proposal that it is my anger, say, that justifies me in believing that I’ve been & Eilidh Harrison [email protected] 1
Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, 67 - 69 Oakfield Avenue, Glasgow G128QQ, UK
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E. Harrison
offended putatively provides us with an intuitive and naturalised explanation as to how we receive epistemic justification for a rich catalogue of our evaluative beliefs. With many notable advocates, this justificatory thesis of emotion is fast becoming a central facet in how we conceive of the emotions’ epistemic role.1 Interestingly, however, comparatively little of the philosophical literature has been dedicated to explicitly isolating what it is about emotional experience that bestows it with the ability to immediately and defeasibly justify belief. The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate an internalist view of emotional justification, namely, one which identifies emotional phenomenology as the source of the emotions’ ability to justify evaluative belief. Support for a phenomenology-based view can be found in various suggestive comments made by notable authors in the philosophy of emotion. Goldie (2004), for example, argues on behalf of an account of emotion ‘‘where the feelings involved are at center stage, playing a centrally important epistemic role in revealing things about the world’’ (p. 92). On a similar note, Tappolet (2016) argues that emotional experiences uniquely ‘‘allow us to be aware of certain features of the world’’ (p. 18), while Johnston (2001) claims that the epistemic import of affec
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