Emotions provide us with energy to engage in intellectual activity. ‘Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration’ by Thomas Edison.
- Emotions as ways of knowing:
1) Emotions as an obstacle to knowledge
2) Emotions as a source of knowledge
3) Intuition
Emotions as an obstacle to knowledge:
Emotions influence the way we see and think about the world. Strong emotions can sometimes distort the three other ways of knowing.
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Perception: our perception of things can be coloured by strong emotion. Emotional
colouring makes us aware and ignorant of aspects of reality. If you love someone then you likely are blind to their faults, whereas if you loathe someone you are likely to see only their faults.
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Reason: If one hold their beliefs too passionately, then this prevents them from being
Open-minded and leads to ‘my theory right or wrong’ kind of attitude.
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Language: Under powerful emotions, one is likely to use slanted and emotive language.
When our emotions are aroused, it is often common to stop listening and start throwing insults
at the person rather than reasons in the ongoing argument.
When in grip of some emotions, we tend to rationalize our pre-existing and not reason
anymore. Our particular emotional attitudes about something prevent us from reasoning and we develop bad reasons in order to justify those things. In common, rationalization occurs when there is a clash between two of our beliefs.
The tendency to rationalize can lead a person to develop an illusory but self-containing belief system. For example, take Henry who has an emotional prejudice against immigrants. This prejudice will be based on:
Biased perception: He notices only lazy ones and overlooks the hardworking immigrants.
Fallacious reasoning: He makes hasty generalizations from his own limited experience.
Emotive language: He concludes that immigrants are ‘bone idle’ and ‘don’t know the
meaning of hard work’.
The above factors will reinforce his prejudice and make it harder for him to be objective. Only with a will of question his prejudiced assumptions and actively considering other perspectives can he break free from this cycle. Fanatics refuse to question their assumptions and/or consider the presented/available evidence that runs contrary to their own beliefs.
Along with distorting our beliefs, emotions can also lead us to make poor decisions. Some
decisions are short-sighted and urgent and can easily blind us to the longer-term consequences of our actions. Since turbulent emotions can distort our actions and behavior, the ideal situation might seem as having no emotions at all and looking at the world in a balanced and objective way. Stoics, followers of the same idea advocated a state of mind called apathy- literally ‘without passion’ where the mind could mirror reality in a calm and untroubled way.
Emotions as a source to knowledge:
Some studies suggest that if you did not have any emotions then your life would quickly
disintegrate. Emotions help us to make rational decisions by narrowing down our options so that we can choose between a manageable number of them. (?)
- The relation between reason and emotion:
Although thought of as different entities, reason and emotion are closely linked and it is difficult
to make a distinction between them. Rather than either-or relationship, perhaps a more-or-less continuum of mental activity running from the very rational to the very emotional would describe the relationship between the two.
An emotion that is sensitive to the real nature of a situation is more rational than one that is not.
As Aristotle suggested that some emotions can be more rational or less rational. He observed:
“Anyone can be angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not easy.”
We all experience irrational emotions but, since it is difficult to switch them off, we may find it easier to adjust our beliefs to our emotions than bring our emotions into line with reason and therefore we arrive back at rationalization.
Intuition:
The word ‘intuition’ is associated with the instant moment of realization where one suddenly
sees the solution to a problem without going through any conscious process of reasoning. Also it is used with the ‘sixth sense’ hunches about things. You may, for example, get the intuition that someone is staring at you behind you and when you do turn around there is some doing exactly so! But this is not reliable as there are times when you turn around and there is no one there!
Core Intuitions: our most fundamental intuitions about life, the universe and everything.
Subject-specific intuitions: the intuitions we have in various areas of knowledge such as science
and ethics.
Social Intuitions: our intuitions about other people, what they are like, whether or not they can
be trusted, etc.
It could be argued that all our knowledge is based on intuition. As although reason and
perception are usually said to give us knowledge, they ultimately depend on intuition.
Reason: the laws of logic are the starting point for all our reasoning, but we cannot
prove them in terms of any more fundamental laws. It asked to justify them; most people would say that they are intuitively obvious.
Perception: although an important source of knowledge, we cannot be sure on the evidence of our sense alone that life is not a dream as any evidence would be a part of it as well. Yet we have a strong intuition that the dream hypothesis is false and that what we are experiencing is reality.
There is a school of thought called romanticism that is associated with emotions much in the same way that there are schools of thought associated with perception (empiricism) and reason (rationalism). If intuition is to be taken as a source of knowledge then problems arise as well. Some times there are conflicting intuitions and what is obvious to one may not be to another. These three questions mentioned next cast doubt on intuition as a source of knowledge.
- If something intuitively obvious, must everyone agree about it? Is there anything that everyone agrees about?
- Could you be wrong in thinking something is intuitively obvious? Might you one day come to see that what you now think as intuitively obvious is in fact a deeply rooted prejudice?
- Whose intuitions should you trust? Are some people’s intuitions better than others?
- Subject-Specific Intuitions:
There is countless amount of evidence to suggest that our uneducated intuition in subjects such
as logic, mathematics, physics, biology, history, economics, and ethics are at best confuse and at worst false. Lets look at three subject: Physics, Biology, and Ethics.
Physics: quantum mechanics, need I say more?
Biology: 200 years ago it was intuitively obvious that evolution was not possible yet now
there is a consensus amongst the biologists that nature does word blindly and species gradually evolve into other ones.
Ethics: moral intuitions. The problem being conflicting right and wrong intuitions
between different people.
Not only intuition is fallible but also we tend to be overconfident about our own intuitions. We
tend to put a lost of trust in our intuitions about other people and we pride ourselves on being good judges of character. However how many times are we wrong? Experiments have shown people who think they can tell
when someone is lying have done no better than those who guessed at random.
- Natural and educated intuitions:
Natural intuitions do not always help us to understand the world. Expert intuition is another
matter for these are supported by many years of experience and expertise. Most breakthroughs in the history of ideas have come about as a result of flashes of creative intuition. Poincaré stated: “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.” Some might regard intuition as a mysterious source of knowledge out of laziness as it would be great to be coming up with ideas from time to time about the nature of things sitting in a garden or taking a bath? Therefore, there seem to be two necessary conditions for having good ideas:
- A thorough knowledge of the relevant field 2) Unusually good powers of concentration.
- How reliable is intuition?
Expert intuition is generally more reliable then natural intuition. We can test our own intuitions,
as most of us will never operate the rarefied intellectual level of Newton or Poincaré against other sources of knowledge. If one’s intuitions coincide with reason and experience and other people’s intuitions, then it makes more sense to trust them than if they do not.
Conclusion:
We have seen that all our knowledge tools are double-edged, and that they can both contribute to our knowledge of the world and be an obstacle to it. Rather than rely on any one way of knowing, we need to test them against one another when trying to establish the truth. The step beyond that is to compare our own opinions with those of others to see how they stand in the open market of ideas.
