Should emotion play a role in the evaluation of knowledge claims?

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Should emotion play a role in the evaluation of knowledge claims? Are there circumstances under which, in order to evaluate a knowledge claim, one should ignore or, alternatively, pay special attention to one’s emotions? 

We would think of emotion and reason as two completely different things. However, it is difficult to make a clear distinction between them. According to me, Reason is a sense of awareness; its function is to arrive at a conclusion from the observational data. And reason is a volitional sense; it has the power to change its logic and in turn its conclusions. Emotion, by contrast, is a sense not of perception, but of reaction to one's perceptions. This kind of sense has no power of observation. In short, Reason is what one does to reach a conclusion and emotion is how one will live with consequence.

To test this premise, let us take an ethical dilemma as ethics uses both reason and emotion to come to a conclusion. Let the ethical dilemma be ‘Is abortion wrong?’  

Let us use reason to come to a conclusion. One would see abortion as a wrong practice if their religion said it was a wrong practice (Christianity says that every life is precious) and if it is illegal in their country. They would see it as the correct thing to do if  they do not have enough money to support the child, if they were rape victims and they do not want they baby and if it they already have children and do not want anymore. Let us suppose that I am a rape victim. I do not want the child but even though I have made my decision it is hard to finally do it. Even though there is debate on this issue, we would think of the fetus as alive and emotion would start playing. Emotion would make us think if we could live with the decision. If we couldn’t, we would probably change our decision so we could live with it afterwards.

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So we can say that emotion is almost like an opposite of reason; there are times like when we are solving a maths problem, we are in the reason part of the spectrum and there are times like when we are furious we are in the emotion part of the spectrum and there are other times when we are somewhere in the middle.

Let us consider another ethical dilemma. There was once a bridge which spanned a large river. During most of the day the bridge sat with its length running up and down the river paralleled with the ...

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