Question How can one acquire knowledge through emotions only?

Accepted:
December 22, 2006

Comments

It really depends upon what it is that one is supposed to come to know this way--and it will also depend upon just what one takes the requirements of knowledge to consist in.

Some epistemologists have argued that we have a kind of privileged access to knowledge of our own mental (including emotional states) themselves. These philosophers would think that at least one sort of knowledge we could attain through emotions was knowledge of those emotions themselves--knowledge that we were in such-and-such a state at a given time (for example, knowledge that I am angry right now, or sad). But others do not think that we necessarily know our own states in any privileged way--we might really be angry, but not know that we are, or we might think we are angry, but actually not really be.

As for other sorts of knowledge, such as knowledge of the world outside of our own consciousness, I am inclined to think that we cannot "acquire knowledge through emotions only." As important as the emotions are in our lives, I do not think they are very reliable or clearly informative as sources of cognition (such as knowledge).

"Knowledge" might be divided into four types: (1) theoretical knowledge (knowing that X); (2) practical knowledge (know how); (3) familiarity (knowing someone); and (4) moral knowledge (knowing what's right).

1. Emotion alone doesn't seem able to produce theoretical knowledge. In fact, emotion often obstructs it.

2. Emotion alone can't make it possible for us to know how to do something--e.g. drive a car or play the violin. But it can be a necessary condition for us knowing how, for example, to play music well or for knowing how to manage people psychologically (as an effective manager, parent, or politician might know how to do).

3. Emotion might be the result of familiarity, but knowing someone isn't made possible by emotion alone.

4. The very idea of moral "knowledge" is a strange one, but one might say that knowing what the right thing to do in a given situation might be said to be determined through feeling. But I doubt it would make sense to say that emotion alone yields moral determinations.

There is another way emotion might be said to function relevant to your question. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Soren Kierkegaard have held that certain specific emotions--like anxiety and a specific form of nausea--are part of the disclosure of certain very general features of human existence, in particular its contingency, its finitude, and our freedom in the face of it. Calling this knowledge might be a bit of a stretch, but it wouldn't be entirely misplaced.

The anglo-american philosophical tradition has not been very kind to the emotions until relatively recently, when there has been an upsurge of support for the idea (latent, however, in Aristotle) that emotions can have cognitive content - they can tell you stuff about how the world is. The emphasis has rather been on the opposing dynamic of emotion - their ability to disrupt rational processes and so constitute an obstable to knowledge. Certainly, emotions can be an obstacle to knowledge; but it is important not to underestimate their positive cognitive power too. In the early eighties, feminist philosophers started writing about the role of emotions in telling you important things about your social experience: your anger that you are treated a certain way might be telling you something, namely, it's unjust to be treated this way. If you are living in a social-conceptual environment that offers you no tools to making sense of your experience as one of mistreatment, your anger is vulnerable to seeming misplaced, hysterical, when in fact the contrary is the case - your anger is a rational response to the treatment you are receiving, but collective forms of interpretation have not caught up yet. In cases like this, emotions can be a crucial cognitive resource for social and ethical change. And more recently there has been a lot more work vindicating the cognitive contribution of emotion.

Cases like the anger example above support the idea that emotion can have not only intentional content (it is directed to the world, it is about the world) but also cognitive content (it represents the world as being a certain way, and thus permits of truth or falsity). The anger example is primarily a case of ethical/political knowledge, but we can easily imagine more plainly empirical versions where what our emotional responses are telling us concerns, for instance, someone else's psychological states. For example, an emotional response of distrust or suspicion can tell us (defeasibly, of course - like any evidence) that someone has malevolent intentions towards us. These sorts of human response are crucial indicators for us in our social dealings with other people. At the minumum, they provide us with evidence, and if suitably reliable, can provide for empirical knowledge of others' psychology (intentions, attitudes). But more than this, rather than the emotions constituting evidence on which knowledge might be based, perhaps the emotions can themselves constitute the knowledge. Perhaps your anger, your suspicion, your trust, your sympathy can be the form of your cognitive grasp of the relevant facts.

Question How can one acquire knowledge through emotions only? Accepted:December 22, 2006

Question How can one acquire knowledge through emotions only?

Accepted:
December 22, 2006