Evaluate the Ways in Which Emotion Might Enhance and/or Undermine Reason as a Way of Knowing

One of the best defences put forth by Solomon to explain that emotions are rational is that emotions changes in regard to new information, and as a persons opinions change regarding a situation8, which are often fluid and unfixed. Therefore, according to Solomon, because emotions can be changed by an individual, they are rational. Furthermore, Solomon points out that one cannot experience the feeling of anger without choosing to be angry. (He does however, make a concession to being able to pretend to experience a feeling). To further explain how emotions are rational, Solomon argues that we can have incorrect emotions, just like we can have incorrect actions. Solomon writes “it is possible and not unusual to misidentify what one is angry about.”9 Like choosing an incorrect social action (a faux pas at social gathering), one can choose the incorrect emotion for the situation, such as feeling angry towards someone in a setting due to an inconvenience, when politeness would work better, or misinterpreting friendliness for attraction.

If our emotions are altered it will create impulsive or irrational decisions. For example in the play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare, Hamlet is emotionally unstable and is angry with his mother because she does not value the death of his father. At the moment Polonius yells for help behind the drapes for him Hamlet stabs him thinking it was Claudius. Hamlet used his anger to make a decision, to either kill the person behind the drapes, assumably Claudius. Or making the right choice and and discovering who is behind the drapes; if it was Claudius then killing him.

Let’s begin to examine what Jagger’s method of investigative dispassionate belief means. Jagger realizes that emotion, like sensory observation is ignored or not taken into consideration in western epistemology. Jagger believes however, that emotions are needed for human survival and thus, emotions have an essential and useful value and “without emotion, human life would be unthinkable”. (pp.190, Jagger)

With the aid of a notebook, write down one of those negative beliefs like nothing will ever work out for me. Write out as many as you can think of and then choose a counter-belief such as Tom was able to come out of debt and own a multimillion dollar business, if he did it, so can I. Then as you go about your daily business – write down every piece of evidence that reaffirms the new belief system that is being created ignoring what opposes. As you continue this, pay attention to how you feel as the thoughts and emotions become more positive. Your subconscious mind has a different belief system which often times do not line up with our desires, the beliefs will always come out as winners. This is even more encouragement to improve, renew and change your belief systems. Emotions are vibrations of

argues how fear has a direct impact on our judgment. He tries to prove that as a result of feeling

Attempts to define “emotion” have proved to be rather difficult. Instead of searching for a comprehensive definition, Gross (2011) describes the three core features of emotions. First, emotions occur when an individual decides that a situation is relevant to his or her goals. Second, emotions are multi-faceted, and involve both subjective and physiological experiences, as well as behaviors. The third feature involves the authoritative nature of emotions. They have the powerful ability to interrupt ongoing processes, assert their priority over other activities, and force their way into awareness. For example, some traditions describe emotions as “disorganized interruptions of mental activity” (Salovey & Mayer, 1989). Emotions are such an

(a) What is emotionism? What evidence is there in support of epistemic 
emotionism? Provide 2 examples and explain them. Is there evidence 
for metaphysical emotionism?

My job as a volunteer, is at times to call certain groceries to delivering the food to the warehouse. Through more emotional seasons such as Thanksgiving and Christmas (sometimes families in desperate need come to the actual warehouse), the appeal of emotions work better than the idea of reason. The reason for this is the natural nature of human beings. Humans naturally are not sadistic creatures instead the trait of empathy is imperative to our decisions regarding morals. Our empathy for others and emotional understanding allows us to produce more knowledge through shared knowledge as it gives a path to understanding of others. However, in opposition to this view reason can not be counted out in term of being left to operating purely on emotion. Without  reason I would decide to give every family that showed an entire ration to last them for years, but this would lead to consequences that are not wanted. As a result we should not rely on pure individual emotions as the foundation of  our moral decisions but also have a more consistent system to make our decisions based off of which is reason. With this being said emotions often times contradict our reasoned arguments but both are codependent of each other in the justification of

Sensemaking is referred to as the process that people use to give meaning to experience. In a study by Kligyte, Connelly, Thiel, and Devenport (2013),undergraduates justified five controversial public statements to scorers. The participant's emotions were manipulated through the use of feedback from two doctorate level students. Anger was induced by the confederates informing the participants- they scored poorly due to a "hard grader" (Kligyte, Connelly, Thiel, & Devenport, 2013, p. 304). Fear was induced by informing the participants that the scorers were experiencing difficulty scoring due to a pattern that they found particularly concerning. The participant then completed the Ethical Decision-Making Measure. The results suggest that anger inhibited participants ethical decision-making abilities and sensemaking. On the other hand, fear appeared to facilitate ethical decision-making when compared to anger the neutral emotion condition. The authors suggest that fear cued a broader information search in hope of reducing uncertainty and

• that a person can learn to become aware of the interaction of cognition, emotion, and behavior; and that altering the ones that may be more directly under our control or influence – cognition and behavior – will impact the person’s responses on all levels.

Emotional objection separates into four families. First, emotions are blind forces that have nothing to do with reasoning because they are

Researchers have debated about the phenomenon with emotions. Debates on this topic have and will continue to for many more years. Researchers have attempted to understand why one has emotions and came up with the five different theories. The first theory is the James-Lange theory, which argues that an event can cause physiological arousal first and, it can be interpret this as an arousal. Second theory is the Cannon-Bard theory that argues that all humans experience a physiological arousal and an emotional one at the same time. It still does not give any attention to the role of the thoughts or an outward

Chapter 1 explains the work of a Harvard psychologist named William James. William published the article “What is an Emotion?” in a philosophical journal entitled Mind in 1884. His paper is an argument for the primacy and necessity of bodily systems in producing emotional feelings. James-Lange theory states that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. A Harvard physiologist, Walter Cannon, roundly criticized James’ theory, claiming that, according to the Cannon Bard theory, physiological changes follow emotional expression.

In the next paragraphs I will consider some theories, factors and evidence on cognitive controlling of emotion in terms of

For many people, they live their lives based on emotions. Emotions of happiness, love, success, and many more, could possibly be the most satisfying feelings. Except we commonly experience unpleasant emotions. There are emotions of anger, hatred, sadness, and disgrace. A very important question in the understanding of the human mind and highly related to cognitive science, is how do these emotions affect human cognition and the impact on our abilities to be rational? To tackle this question, we need to understand what emotions are, but not solely in the manner we are all familiar with, we need to understand them from a cognitive nature involving our physiology, psychology, and environment. Cognition, according to the Oxford definition