Tricia Magalotti

My thesis concerns the epistemic rationality of emotions. Many think that emotions are representations of value (e.g., fear represents dangerousness). I endorse this picture and argue further that emotions, like beliefs, are assessable for epistemic justification. There is a puzzle that arises in the form of three independently plausible but mutually inconsistent theses. The overall project is to present an account of the epistemology of emotion that resolves this apparent tension. In order to do this, I aim to develop a consequentialist account of epistemic justification that is applicable to a wider range of mental state types than traditional theories of epistemic justification, which are often limited to beliefs and/or credences. I then apply the account in order to answer certain questions about the epistemic justification of emotions in particular.

Hilary Kornblith has argued for the plausibility of the view that epistemologists, and especially reliabilists about epistemic justification, would be better off without the concept of epistemic reasons. The thrust of his argument, as I understand it, is that it is plausible that belief explanations that invoke the concept of epistemic reasons are likely to either conflict with or be made obsolete by more sophisticated explanations from cognitive science. In this chapter I resist this conclusion, arguing that there is no reason to think that the concept of epistemic reasons is incompatible with evidence from cognitive science and that epistemic reasons play a crucial role in explaining various doxastic phenomena. Furthermore, I argue that this is the case even if we assume the truth of reliabilism.

Among those who think that emotions can provide epistemic reasons for belief, there is disagreement about whether emotions provide foundational reasons (ones that are not based on further reasons) or non-foundational reasons (ones that are based on further reasons). I argue in this paper that considerations about evidence of emotional unreliability favour the non-foundational view of emotional reasons. The argument starts with a set of counterexamples to the claim that evidence of emotional unreliability always defeats emotional justification. I then show why only the non-foundational picture of emotional reasons is compatible with this finding. The upshot is 2-fold: first, the commonly held assumption that evidence of emotional unreliability always defeats emotional justification is false; and, second, this gives us a reason for preferring a non-foundational picture of emotional reasons.

In this paper, I consider the potential implications of the observation that epistemic judgment seems to be less emotional than moral judgment. I argue that regardless of whether emotions are necessary for blame, blaming emotions do play an important epistemic role in the moral domain. They allow us to grasp propositions about moral blameworthiness and thereby to appreciate their significance in a special way. Further, I argue that if we generally lack blaming emotions in the epistemic domain, then we are unable to grasp propositions about epistemic blameworthiness. As a result, regardless of one’s theory of epistemic blame, there emerges a tension between the claim that we are epistemically blameworthy for our epistemic failings and the claim that we do not feel epistemic blaming emotions.

While it is commonly accepted that justified beliefs must be strongly supported by evidence and that support comes in degrees, the question of how much evidential support one needs in order to have a justified belief remains. In this paper, I consider how the question about degrees of evidential support connects with recent debates between consequentialist and deontological explanations of epistemic norms. I argue that explaining why strong, but not conclusive, evidential support is required for justification should be one explanandum that such theories seek to explain. Furthermore, I argue that foundational theories that appeal to the promotion of epistemic value (especially consequentialism, but perhaps also some versions of epistemic deontology) are better suited to provide such an explanation.

Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justified whereas, mutatis mutandis, fear of a peanut rolling on the floor is not. But there is a difficulty in understanding why emotions are epistemically assessable. It is clear why beliefs, for instance, are epistemically assessable: epistemic assessability is, arguably, assessability with respect to likely truth, and belief is by its nature concerned with truth; truth is, we might say, belief’s “formal object.” Emotions, however, have formal objects different from truth: the formal object of fear is danger, the formal object of indignation is injustice, and so on. Why, then, are emotions epistemically assessable too? Here we make a negative claim and a positive claim. On the negative side, we consider how cognitivist and perceptualist accounts of emotion may respond to this challenge, and argue against those responses. On the positive side, we develop an alternative picture of the domain of the epistemically evaluable, according to which any mental state which is constitutively evidence-responsive is epistemically assessable, regardless of whether its formal object is truth.