Emotions as ways of knowing

The traditional view claims that the emotions are more of an obstacle than a source of knowledge, but they play more a positive role in our mental lives and, without them, we would be unable to make sense of the world.

Emotions as an obstacle to knowledge

Emotions are an integral part of our mental lives, they influence the way we see and think about the world. Strong emotions sometimes distort the three other ways of knowing:

-Perception: our perception of things can be colored by strong emotions, and there is some truth in sayings like ‘love is blind’ and ‘fear has many eyes’.

-Reason: if you hold your beliefs with too much passion, this can prevent you being open-minded and lead to a ‘my theory right or wrong’ kind of attitude.

-Language: A person in the grip of a powerful emotion is likely to use slanted and emotive language.

Many times in life, emotions can undermine our ability to think clearly. When our emotions are aroused, it is all too easy to stop listening to the person we are arguing with and to start trading insults rather than reasons.

Rationalisations

When we are in the grip of strong emotions, we tend not to reason in an objective way but to rationalise our pre-existing prejudices.

We tend to rationalise when there is a conflict between two or more of our beliefs. At the limit, the tendency to rationalise can lead a person to develop an illusory but self-confirming belief system:

1- Powerful emotions
2- Biased perception
3- Fallacious reasoning
4- Emotive language

Irrational behaviour

Our emotions can not only distort our beliefs, but also lead us to make poor decisions. Some emotions are urgent and short sighted and they can easily blind us to the longer-term consequences of our actions.

Turbulent emotions can distort our ability to think clearly and behave intelligently.

Emotions as a source of knowledge

Some studies of brain-damaged patients n fact suggest that if you did not have any emotions then your life would quickly disintegrate. The scientific ‘Antonio Damasio’ speculates that emotions help us to make rational decisions about things by narrowing down our options so that we can choose between a manageable number of them.

The above suggests that although we tend to think of reason and emotion as two different things, in practice they are closely related to one another and it is difficult to make a clear distinction between them.

Rather than think of reason and emotion as completely different things, it makes more sense to say that there is a continuum of mental activity running from the very rational to the very emotional.

Furthermore, rather than think of reason and emotion as being opposed to one another, it may be more sense to say that our emotions can be more or less rational.


From: Theory of knowledge, Richard van de Lagemaat