RESPONSIBLE BELIEVING

S. Joel Garver

CHAPTER SEVEN

On What the Little Prince Learned:
Emotions and Belief

Section I

In sections 5 through 8 of his Valuing Emotions (manuscript 1993) Michael Stocker explores a number of the interrelations between epistemological concerns, ethical concerns, value, and the emotions. In particular, he argues that a "person with correct emotions is, for that reason, well-placed to make good evaluative judgments, and that the person with incorrect emotions, or with no emotions, is, for that reason, ill-placed to make good evaluative judgments (1993:51). Furthermore, Stocker argues not only that emotions are important for evaluative judgments and actions, but also that emotions are internal to value--important to value itself.

While my interests are more epistemological in nature than ethical, they are, broadly speaking, evaluative concerns and are closely correlated to those that Stocker explores. If emotions play the role that Stocker suggests within evaluative doxastic practices, then they probably play similar roles within a wide variety of doxastic practices. Furthermore, as the last chapter suggested, all or most doxastic practices involve value (in that they are valuable to the person who engages in them) and evaluation (in that they presume their own outputs to be prima facie justified and involve standards for further assessing those outputs). Furthermore, intellectual virtue and vice, as well as epistemic obligations and normativity are important aspects of belief-formation.

Stocker outlines various ways in which the emotions can play roles in doxastic practices and, in particular, practices that give rise to evaluative knowledge. Our concerns are wider than just evaluative knowledge, but an examination of such knowledge will provide a helpful starting point. Stocker's primary examples are drawn from psychoanalytic literature (some of these examples will be outlined below) and from these he draws, among others, the following conclusions:

The first two of these points underline the central instrumental role that emotions can play in doxastic practices and, together with the fourth point, show how having a certain emotional configuration can affect or constitute one's epistemic obligations or what is epistemically permitted or prohibited to a subject.

Consider the following example. Unless Clement has a reputation for having remarkable insight into what others are feeling and thinking, it is natural to question his snap judgment that Cecilia was upset about something. We only saw Cecilia for a few brief moments and she seemed apparently happy and, after all, we don't know her very well. On the other hand, we are likely to take Clement's judgment seriously if we know that he is a very close friend of Cecilia's since childhood, in fact, more than a friend, as they have recently become engaged to be married.

In the latter case it is not simply the prolonged exposure that Clement has had to Cecilia's facial features, bodily movements, tones of voice, emotional states, and so on, that make Clement's judgment to be taken as a legitimate one. To the contrary, prolonged exposure coupled with indifference is of no help in justifiably forming such judgments and coupled with, for example, malice, such exposure can lead to a profound inability to make any of those sorts of judgments at all or, even worse, to misjudge grossly. What is important to us in taking Clement's judgment to be justified is that Clement has had prolonged exposure to Cecilia imbued with attention, respect, affection, and empathy. Furthermore, it is important to us that Clement is not given to intemperance in judgment, overestimations of his perceptive abilities, or any other vice affecting his judgment.

And this is not a peculiar case. Such affective aspects are part and parcel of doxastic practices involved with the judgments of character and emotional states that are necessary in marriage, friendship, ministry, counseling, and most of social intercourse. In terms of justification, then, our judgment that a belief is justified may depend not only on the belief in question with its grounds or the doxastic practice of which it is a product. It may also include our assessment of the emotional states that are required for or facilitate the proper functioning of a doxastic practice, virtues and vices that can bolster or distort the practice, and whether the subject has rightly engaged herself in that practice. That we can often make such or withhold such ascriptions of justification with great facility--and often, great accuracy--attests to the degree to which we are immersed in them ourselves.

To give more substance to this account, let us turn to some of the examples that Stocker draws from psychoanalytic and related literature. There are many well-known ways in which having the wrong sorts of emotions can adversely affect a subject's epistemic success. For example,

Another example,

But few, if any, broad generalizations may be made from such typical cases of epistemic failure through distorted emotional life. And generalization must be circumscribed within specific contexts.

Correct emotions, on other hand, can lead to epistemic success. In addition to the case of Clement and Cecilia cited above, we may think of various ways in which feeling empathy may help us understand the other. We may think of how trained concern and excitement, along with a certain detachment from the patient as a person, allows medical professionals to work quickly to recall information and procedures in order save lives in emergency situations. We may consider various cases of these sorts, but still few, if any, broad generalizations may be made from such typical examples.

Our inability to make broad generalizations stems from the following sorts of facts. Very similar sets of emotions can serve either to undermine or to facilitate truth-conducive belief-formation given particular kinds of persons and particular sets of circumstances. Thus, epistemic connections between affective states and beliefs, judgments, or evaluations must be drawn with their concreteness and particularity intact. And so Stocker writes the following:

It is, then, not only having certain correct emotions or being morally virtuous or engaging in a doxastic practice with a ethical teleology that facilitates knowledge. Under certain circumstances and with the right subjects, hate can be an epistemic virtue. Stocker continues,

Thus the relations between various kinds of affectivity, various people groups, and various situations have typical, deep, and systematic structures which, nevertheless, fall far short of broad generality.

But Stocker does not simply argue that there are connections between certain kinds of emotions and epistemically proper (or improper) evaluations, judgments, and the like (relativized to appropriate subjects and contexts). He argues further that certain kinds of emotions are intrinsic or internal to value and thus play more than an instrumental role in belief-formation.

For instance, we are in some ways epistemically obliged to get sufficient sleep since such rest is instrumental for many kinds of justified judgments, but sufficient sleep is not intrinsic to successful judgments (though consider subjective knowledge of what it is like to go without sleep or to be well rested). Stocker argues that while having the right sorts of emotions is instrumental to value in that it disposes one to be a good judge, it is also internal to value in that being a good judge is "an important part of what it is to live well and to be good" (1993:75). Attentiveness to value or love of value is also instrumental to value (proper evaluations and the like), and yet it is intrinsic to value as well because it is part of what it is to be a morally good person (1993:75).

A similar point may be drawn within more narrowly epistemic territory. We take truth in general and, especially, in some areas (the obvious, self-knowledge, inter-personal knowledge), to be good and valuable (at least in most contexts) and, thus, a legitimate end for human activity and habit. It is this evaluative teleology that structures much of our doxastic life. Therefore, emotional connection to, attentiveness towards, and love of truth is internal to what we value in the epistemic sphere and part of what it is to be a good person. I mean this at least in an epistemic sense, though, I think, with heavy moral overtones. "The true," after all, is the perennial companion to the "the good" as well as "the beautiful."

Stocker further argues, basing the argument in part on Aristotle's discussion of pleasure (see the Nicomachean Ethics VII.11-14 and X.1-5), that emotions are not only valuable because they reveal value, but also because they are closely and inseparably bound up with value itself--emotions can constitute value, especially considered in the context of emotionally-infused activity. For example, certain activities are valuable in that in taking up the activity in itself we have enjoyment or pleasure and not simply because enjoyment or pleasure is produced by the activity as an end.

In the epistemic context we can make similar points. The same affective state or states that permit a certain activity or doxastic practice to produce or be constitutive of knowledge may also infuse that activity with value. The acquisition of knowledge or, at least, certain kinds of knowledge may be valuable in part because of the value of the emotions that went into the acquisition of that knowledge. Valuable emotions can influence how we shape our doxastic lives and, resultingly, what sorts of knowledge are available to us. Having the right sorts of emotions, that is, those in accord with moral virtue, is, therefore, profoundly constitutive of the formation of wide venues of our doxastic lives. Wrong sorts of emotions, though sometimes granting epistemic success, produce belief that is lacking in value and, in many cases, is seriously distorted and unjustified. Thus there are deep and systematic connections between being an emotionally sensitive and balanced person of virtue and achieving epistemic success. On the other hand, the vicious person is apt to fall into epistemic failures.

Even granting these various points that Stocker has helped us make, our picture of belief-formation suffers from complications rather than elucidations. It is certainly clearer that beliefs are formed in various circumstances and in various ways, but it is also less clear in a number of respects: whether any general account of belief-formation has been constructed, under what conditions beliefs are justified or rationally taken to be justified, and whether we are responsible for belief (unless we are responsible for our emotions). In respect to this last point, let us to turn to an account of the emotions and our control over them.