Reasoning and Emotion, in the light of the Dual Processing Model of

Cognition

Ronald de Sousa

Philosophy, University of Toronto (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~sousa)

sousa@chass.utoronto.ca

ABSTRACT:

I begin, in §1, with some distinctions and an attempt at a working characterization of rationality that is intended to

be usable across the domains of action, belief, desire, and even feeling. In §2 I sketch the ambiguous role that

emotions play in our capacity to reason. I suggest that emotions span the two tracks or “systems” posited by “dual

process” theories of reasoning, or what Daniel Kahneman (2011) has recently called “thinking, fast and slow”. In §3,

the main features of that hypothesis are described, and some questions raised about its significance. In §4, I briefly

characterise emotions and describe some of the ways in which they seem to contribute both indirectly and directly to

our capacity for reasoning, and straddle the two systems. In §5 I compare the learned and the evolutionarily more

primitive components of S1. In §6 I turn specifically to the contributions that epistemic feelings make to our

epistemic ends. §7 summarises my main conclusions.

§ 1. Preliminaries: What is rationality?

To describe someone as rational is generally held to be a form of praise. It suggests that they

reason soundly, take appropriate notice of evidence in forming their opinions, and are willing to

change their minds when confronted with a good argument for doing so; it implies that their

attitudes are not grounded in superstition, swayed by prejudice, or driven by blind passions.

Although it is difficult to see how one might find fault with such characteristics, it is also true

that both laypersons and philosophers can be found to complain that one can be “too rational”.

The accusation can stem from a number of concerns. Before trying to sort these out, it might be

useful to fix the boundaries of my own usage. To that end, I begin with two stipulations about the

word ‘rationality’, and make bold to offer a definition.

First, it is important to remember that the term can be used in either a normative or a

categorial sense. These are distinguished by their antonyms. In the categorial sense, the opposite

of ‘rational’ is ‘arational’, which applies to inanimate things and lower animals. (Whether it

applies to higher nonhuman animals is contested). In the normative sense its antonym is

‘irrational’, which is usually taken as pejorative. In the phrase ‘rational animal’ the word must, of

course, be understood in the categorial sense: it is precisely because human beings are capable of

irrationality that they are said to be rational animals.

Second, the word ‘rationality’ covers more than ‘reasoning’. The latter concept belongs

exclusively in the category of what is rational/irrational. There is no such thing as a-rational

reasoning. Furthermore, reasoning aims at rationality in transitions between mental states

(typically but not exclusively propositional states), to the exclusion of questions about the

acquisition of such states. But although my title mentions ‘reasoning’ rather than rationality, I

shall not adhere closely to this restriction. For my concern is with the role of emotions in

epistemology more generally, and emotions relate to intuitions as well as transitions. I shall be

interested in both.

Now for my definition. Despite the disputes and the vast technical literature to which the

concept has given rise, I think it is possible to cut a fairly clean swath through those debates and

provide a generic definition of normative rationality and irrationality. I suggest that normative

rationality consists in the efficiency of means used in the pursuit of any given goal. Thus baldly

stated, the definition must appear simplistic. Most of the complexities of the notion are packed

into the questions that arise about the “goals” in question.

Our nature as human agents comprises four basic faculties. We experience the world, we

have desires and form beliefs about it, and we act to change it. In acting, we pursue goals in the

most obvious ordinary sense. So far, my simple definition works well enough: for any intentional

action, we can identify a goal and assess the means we choose to it for efficiency. Any putative

counterexample will, I surmise, rest on the fact that when pursuing a given goal, we necessarily

have a welter of other goals and concerns that must also be taken into account. This can cause

indefinitely many complications, but doesn’t impugn the general definition.

The specific form of rationality pertaining to the other faculties will be relative to the

characteristic ends of that faculty. Although the notion of a practical goal is the most intuitively

easy to grasp, it is not the most fundamental. More fundamental is the question of what goals are

worth having: we could call this the goal of correctness in desire, or simply of valuing what is

valuable. Similarly, we can criticise the rationality of our beliefs, in terms of the epistemic ends

that govern what we believe and how we acquire beliefs. We can also, though more

controversially, speak of the rationality of what we feel, providing we can identify the “ends” of

emotion. In that spirit, we can tabulate the main forms of rationality in terms of the distinct goals

to which they tend, their characteristic Direction of Fit (DoF), the intentional states typically

concerned, and the processes that are assessed for rationality, as in Table 1.

TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

Note that there is a certain symmetry between our practical and evaluative goals on the

one hand and our epistemic goals on the other. For the pragmatic tradition, which goes back to

Protagoras, truth is a tool of success: one needs to know how the world is in order to act

effectively. Conversely, if one holds, with Socrates, that truth is the fundamental value, practical

success is just a consequence of correct belief: its corollaries are that “no one does wrong

willingly” and “virtue is knowledge” (see Meno and Protagoras in (Plato 1997).) In more recent

history, William Clifford (1886) is on the side of Socrates: one ought to care more about truth

than advantage – practical rationality be damned. William James (James 1979) was in the

tradition of Protagoras, and so perhaps was Richard Rorty (1979): you should care about real

consequences and not abstract truth – and your epistemic scruples be dammed.

In the light of these proposals, we can interpret and rebut the suggestion that we can be

too rational. The reproach might stem from a number of concerns. One might be accused of

being too rational because one fails to acknowledge the emotional reality of so-called “irrational

beliefs”. If you have a strong feeling that so-and-so is not to be trusted, but are quite unable to

articulate any reasons for that judgment, you might insist that those who deride your hunch are

being “too rational”. Since hunches of this sort not infrequently turn out to be correct, however,

you might retort that actually those who dismiss them outright are not being rational enough. The

same might be said of someone whose idea of comforting a grieving friend is confined to urging

a “stiff upper lip”, or pointing out that “life must go on”.

In a more theoretical vein, some philosophers have attacked the very idea that one can

reason one’s way to solutions for life’s deepest problems. Telling examples of this last attitude

are to be found in the attacks sustained by Richard Dawkins from thinkers who, while

themselves acknowledged atheists, charge Dawkins’s dismissal of all religious faith with being

simplistic. (Terry Eagleton’s reviews of Dawkins’s God Delusion, in which he describes him as a

“card-carrying rationalist”, took this line, opining that “even Richard Dawkins lives more by

faith than by reason” (Eagleton 2006).1)

It might also be suggested that the very idea of positing an all-encompassing life goal

such as happiness or the good life, which one then undertakes to pursue, is misguided hyper-

rationality. Chance plays an ineliminable role in our lives, and any life plan drawn up so

carefully as to leave nothing to chance is bound to fail. Yet in the light of my definition such a

plan fails because it is delusive: it simply is not the most efficient way to secure happiness.

1 I know of no better counter to Eagleton’s trite accusation that Tim Minchin’s “Storm”, which can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk&feature=related: “Science adjusts its views /Based on what’s observed / Faith is the denial of observation / So that belief can be preserved.”

Trusting oneself to respond spontaneously to serendipity just might be the better way. Again,

then, the over-anxious planner is not being excessively rational, but not rational enough.

And then there are some wilder and grander rejections of rationality, as in Nietzsche’s

“Why truth? Why not untruth?”, or the contention attributed to Sartre that even the acceptance of

the law of non-contradiction is an arbitrary subjective free choice.

§ 2. Emotions and Reason

Emotions, it is widely believed, are the enemies of reason. While many of our emotions

are swiftly triggered by and incorporate beliefs, they are not as easily extinguished if evidence is

produced against the belief in which they are grounded. Emotions typically control the salience

of perceptible or conceivable features of our environment. When in the grip of fear, or hope, or

jealousy, or anger, we apprehend the world in very different ways; emotion highlights certain

features and blocks out others. “Emotion skews the epistemic landscape” (Goldie 2008, 159):

when we are in the grip of passion, we are blinkered.

Blinkers have obvious disadvantages, but they also have their use. From the point of view

of adaptive evolution, it is easy to see that the drawbacks of emotions are simply the reverse of

their crucial function. By narrowing the range of facts to those most relevant to an urgent

response, they spare us the need to deal with the “Frame problem” (Pylyshyn 1987). The Frame

Problem consists in the fact that we cannot consider an indefinitely large amount of information

concerning the potential consequences of any action we might take. Even if we could list all

potentially relevant consequences of an action, the moment would have passed by the time we

had done so. We must therefore, without reflection, choose what to ignore as currently irrelevant

– but we must do so without deliberating about what to consider and what to ignore, lest we get

trapped in an endless regress. So it seems we must either act rashly or get lost in precautionary

reflections. The blinkers imposed by emotion control salience for us, and spare us that dilemma.

In this way, they help to prepare the body for a quick response to a large range of situations

likely to present themselves in most of our lives. 2

Emotions are Janus-faced in yet another sense. Because they can be triggered by

cognitions, and specifically by beliefs conveyed in explicit language, and because they involve

feelings, emotions seem to form an important part of our conscious life. At the same time,

however, they escape conscious control: “experience shows that those who are most agitated by

their passions are not those who know them best” (Descartes 1984 §28).

In what follows, I propose to trace some of the ambiguity in the role that emotions play in

our capacity to reason to the way in which they bridge what Daniel Kahneman (2011) has

recently called “Thinking fast and slow”, or what is more commonly referred to as the hypothesis

of “dual processing”. In the next section, I sketch the importance of that hypothesis.

§3. The Two-Track Mind

A moment’s reflection can attest that we know many things without knowing how.

Retrieving trivial pieces of knowledge such as your mother’s maiden name, is an obvious

example. More interesting is the disconcerting evidence suggesting that when faced with a

moderately complex problem, we are sometimes better off not thinking about it explicitly, and

allowing our unconscious thinking to decide the issue without the help of explicit calculations

and reasoning. This has led some researchers, notably Ap Dijksterhuis, to suggest that there are

two kinds of thinking, one of which is conscious and the other unconscious (Dijksterhuis and

Nordgren 2006) . This is one of many forms taken by the hypothesis of the Two Track Mind, or

Dual Processing. Keith Stanovich listed over 20 variants of this view in (Stanovich 2004, 30),

2This Janus-like character of emotions was noted by Descartes: “The utility of the passions consists alone in their fortifying and perpetuating in the soul thoughts that it is good that it should preserve, and which without that might easily be effaced from it. Similarly, the harm they do is that they fortify these thoughts more than necessary, or that they can serve others on which it is not good to dwell.” (Descartes 1984, §74).

and I shall follow him in referring to the two tracks as the Intuitive and the Analytic, or simply

S1 and S2.

The most important supporting observations for the Two Track Mind derive from the

discovery of systematic modes of irrationality in reasoning: I shall turn to these in §4. But first, I

note that the apparent power of unconscious thought, just noted, in itself constitutes a compelling

motivating observation, particularly when joined to the realization of the surprising limitations of

conscious awareness. In a classic paper, George Miller (1956) pointed out that our capacity for

simultaneous attention to distinct items of thought or perception is extremely limited:

Concentrating on seven unrelated items at once stretches most people’s powers. We deal with

this limitation by “chunking”, which re-encodes complexes of related information into a single

item – a regional code for a phone number, for example, may consist of 3 digits but is encoded as

one “chunk”. While the “magical” character of the number seven (presumably offered tongue-in-

cheek in the first place) has not proved robust (Baddely 1994), the limitations of conscious

memory and attention have been well confirmed. It has therefore become apparent that any

reasoning about even moderately complex matters inevitably relies on much processing that is

inaccessible to consciousness.3

The narrowness of the immediate memory “channel” in “Global Work-space theory”

(Baars 1997; 2002) confirms this first characteristic of one processing system and the

requirement that something else be able to process information without being subject to similar

limitations. Other contrasting characteristics of the two systems are handily summarised by

Jonathan Evans, in an article that presents an authoritative summary of the state of the art on dual

processes. (Evans notes, however, that “the attributes listed in Table 2 do not include emotion,

the discussion of which is generally beyond the scope of this review.” (Evans 2008, 257).)

3 This is not the “dynamic”, “repressed” Unconscious of Freud; but it shares with it a good claim to being a mental, as opposed to simply a neural or physiological state, thus dissociating the issue of mentality from that of consciousness.

[TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]

The contrasts listed in this table form a dauntingly large set, and it is far from obvious

that the two columns really represent two unified systems, each containing all the features listed.

Further, a single one of the contrasting pairs on the list may conceal a number of different

distinctions. To take but the case of automaticity: Agnes Moors and Jan De Houwer have argued

that this term and its contrast collect a number of relatively independent traits that don’t

necessarily belong to a single “system” either in function or brain circuitry: “unintentional,

uncontrolled/uncontrollable, goal independent, autonomous, purely stimulus driven,

unconscious, efficient, and fast” (Moors and De Houwer 2006). Some of these items already

appear separately on Evans’s table. Moors rightly worries about the tangle of conceptual and

empirical assumptions that underlie the assimilation of so many contrasts to two “systems”.

Nevertheless, when we consider all these contrasts in the light of evolution, there is

considerable heuristic value in the idea of a Two Track Mind. The contrasts in Evans’s list

reflect three very general facts about human beings: First, we are mammals, and share with other

mammals adaptations that have established themselves over hundreds of millions of years.

Mammals, including humans, are superb at multi-tasking and solving everyday problems of

living without explicit or deliberate thought, and many of them come about in the course of

maturation. Second, among those mammalian adaptations is the capacity to learn complex

routines that begin with effortful conscious practice, become “overlearned”, and come to look

and feel like reflexive routines.4 Third, we have something that other mammals do not have,

namely language. This involves both maturation and learning. Among other unique features,

language enables us to make goals, belief and desires explicit, and to argue about them in such a

way as to generate entirely new goals, beliefs and desires which could not have existed without

4 Instinctual and learned intuitions or responses can look very similar, but are distinguished by their origins. Our fear of spiders belongs in the first category; our fear of guns, in the second.

the intervention of linguistic processing. The new potentialities that arise from our use of

language interact with, and give rise to, a vast new repertoire of overlearned skills, beliefs, and

values (de Sousa 2007).

Given these three characteristics, and given the importance of emotions in all aspects of

our lives, it is worth asking what specific role emotions might play in our pursuit of epistemic

goals.

§ 4. Emotions and Reasoning

What is an emotion? Most philosophers and psychologists would endorse something like

the following definition of central cases of emotion, due to a leading psychologist: “an episode

of interrelated, synchronised changes in the states of all or most of the five organismic

subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event as relevant to

major concerns of the organism.” (Scherer 2005, 695). The five subsystems are 1) a cognitive

component; 2) a motivational component; 3) a subjective phenomenological component, or

feeling; 4) a physiological component, which works to prepare the body for a response in

accordance (2); and 5) an expressive component.

Note that the first three components are generally available to consciousness. The fourth

belongs rather to the sub-personal level of organization. As for the last, while generally available

to consciousness, it functions to communicate, in a way that is only partly under the subject’s

control. We might look at emotional expression as setting up a sort of arms race between the

sender’s ability to control what is communicated and the receiver’s ability to detect states that

the sender would prefer to conceal. Non-human mimicry in nature contains many examples of

deceptive messages; and it has been argued that human intelligence, with the large brain that

supports it, evolved as an essentially Machiavellian tool destined to facilitate the manipulation of

others’ responses (Dunbar 2003). Since it is a familiar cliché that the emotions play a dominant

role in the sort of rhetorical art that aspires to carry conviction without regard to truth, the point

might be sharpened. That seems to be the brunt of the contention in (Mercier and Sperber 2011)

that the real evolutionary drive behind the honing of our capacity for argument lies in the need to

persuade others (and perhaps oneself) of one’s existing convictions, rather than in the

establishment of truth. But that is not a line of argument I shall have time to pursue.

I turn now to some of the classic forms of systematic irrationality that seem to call for the

Dual Process Hypothesis. Some of these, but not all, seem to implicate emotional causes. What

follows is a small sampling of cases, many of are expounded in (Kahneman 2011).5

My first example might be thought to follow almost logically from the characterisation of

S1 as comparatively automatic, fast and effortless: If a S1 solution is available, we can expect it

to be preferred to any S2 solution in view of a sort of principle of least action. Kahneman sums

up a number of these effects in a single diagram:

FIGURE 1: [COGNITIVE EASE] ABOUT HERE

Kahneman comments:

The various causes of ease or strain have interchangeable effects. When you are in

a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see,

believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is

comfortably familiar. You are also likely to be relatively casual and superficial in

your thinking. When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and

suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and

make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual.”

5 Kahneman's book collects a lifetime of research into a rich intellectual autobiography. Most of this research was not originally reported within the framework of Dual Processing. In the book, however, it has been recast in those terms; that is my first reason for referring to Thinking, Fast and Slow for several examples rather than to the original papers. The other is that it is a fascinating read.

(ibid).

While taking the easy way out might be motivated by mood or emotion, some types of

systematic mistake don’t involve any other specific emotion. Such types often come from our

inability to reason statistically. We are good at apprehending that something is quite frequent, or

more frequent than something else (As attested by a gambling friend of Blaise Pascal who had

detected, but couldn’t explain, that he lost more often when betting on 10 than 9 when casting

two dice.)6 Noticing differences in frequencies seems to be an S1 process. But understanding

why requires explicit mathematical calculation, a typical S2 process.

Here is another striking example, again from Kahneman, of a tricky fallacy concerning

probability:

A study of the incidence of kidney cancer in the 3,141 counties of the United

States reveals a remarkable pattern. The counties in which the incidence of kidney

cancer is lowest are mostly rural, sparsely populated, and located in traditionally

Republican states in the Midwest, the South, and the West. What do you make of

this?.... It is both easy and tempting to infer that their low cancer rates are directly

due to the clean living of the rural lifestyle—no air pollution, no water pollution,

access to fresh food without additives…. Now consider the counties in which the

incidence of kidney cancer is highest. These ailing counties tend to be mostly

rural, sparsely populated, and located in traditionally Republican states in the

Midwest, the South, and the West.... It is easy to infer that their high cancer rates

might be directly due to the poverty of the rural lifestyle—no access to good

medical care, a high-fat diet, and too much alcohol, too much tobacco....

6 In the (possibly apocryphal: I can recover no source for it) story I am relying on, the Chevalier de Méré was puzzled by his observation of the difference in frequency, because he reasoned that since there are two ways of getting 9 and two ways of getting 10 with two dice, the probabilities should be the same. Pascal diagnosed his friend's mistake, which lay in the confusion between combinations and permutations.

Something is wrong, of course. The rural lifestyle cannot explain both very high

and very low incidence of kidney cancer.” (Kahneman 110).

The answer is that it that variance is inversely correlated to sample size. So if kidney

cancer is distributed in a strictly random way, you should expect exactly this result: “sparsely

populated” counties – small samples – will exemplify the most extreme deviations from the

average for strictly mathematical reasons. To become aware of this, we need S2.

In that example, emotion is involved only by dint of our preference for intellectual

laziness. The same is true of some other classic cases involving probability, such as the base rate

fallacy, or the conjunction fallacy (Kahneman Chapter 15, 16). But here is an example that

arguably involves more than merely intellectual laziness, concerning the effect of familiarity.

The word ‘familiarity’ here doesn’t actually need to refer to any awareness of prior acquaintance.

Mere “priming”, an important effect the workings of which have been demonstrated in countless

experimental situations, acts in a way that requires no consciousness of the priming stimulus.

Exposure to some visual or verbal stimulus for a time so short as to produce no conscious

awareness whatever can have significant effects on subsequent interpretations of a situation or a

sentence. Mere familiarity, in that weak sense, induces both the boosting of preference and an

illusion of truth. What is not clear is whether it does the latter because it has done the former, or

whether the two effects are both produced in parallel by the same cause.

A classic experiment illustrates the boosting of preference on the basis of unconscious

familiarity. Robert Zajonc flashed on a screen a number of patterns (e.g. Chinese characters, to

subjects who were not Chinese readers) for a time too short to register in any subject’s awareness

or memory. He then presented the subjects with a number of patterns, and asked them to rate

them for attractiveness. What he found was that those patterns that the subjects had been exposed

to (but had not “seen”) were regarded as more aesthetically pleasing than comparable patterns to

which they had not been exposed. Zajonc concluded, in the words of his famous title, that

“preferences need no inferences” (Zajonc 1980).

A second experiment is more disturbing, and more relevant to reasoning. It shows that to

be familiar with a random phrase is enough to make you inclined to believe any statement that

contains that phrase. “People who were repeatedly exposed to the phrase “the body temperature

of a chicken” were more likely to accept as true the statement that “the body temperature of a

chicken is 144°” (or any other arbitrary number). The familiarity of one phrase in the statement

sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true.” (Kahneman 2011, 62).

Mere perceptual salience, like familiarity, will also promote both credibility and

attractiveness. Kahneman cites another experiment in which proverbs couched in a catchy

rhyming formula were thought more insightful than formulations identical in import but lacking

the rhyme. Thus, “woes unite foes” was judged “more insightful” than “woes unite enemies”,

and “a fault confessed is half redressed” more insightful than “a fault admitted is half redressed”.

(Kahnema 2011, 63) citing (McGlone and Tofighbakhsh 2000) who conclude that “rhyme, like

repetition, affords statements an enhancement in processing fluency that can be misattributed to

heightened conviction.” (424).7

One more effect of effort is worth mentioning. Subjects were asked to solve a simple

problem: In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes

48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half

of the lake? Note that this problem is extremely easy, and that the subjects were all Princeton

undergraduates whose IQ can therefore be assumed to have been unusually high. Here is what

was surprising: to half of the subjects, the puzzle was presented “in a small font in washed-out

gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear

story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test,

but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible.” (Kahneman 66).

7The authors don't discuss an alternative to the hypothesis that the effect on belief is mediated by the effect on fluency. Familiarity may have caused both fluency and conviction independently.

From these various experiments Kahneman concludes: “These findings add to the

growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on

System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach,

and increased effort also go together.” (Kahneman 2011, 69).

§ 5 Evolution and Learning

One item on Evans’s table that is puzzling is the contrast between “Evolutionarily Old”

and “Evolutionarily Recent”. Although the capacity for learning is one we share with other

mammals, as I noted above, the outcome of a process of overlearning can seem just as automatic,

fast and effortless — in short, typically S1 — as any reflexive behaviour. And that should remind

us that in the normal process of development we learn many things that are difficult at the

beginning and become easy with practice. Operant conditioning is the best known mechanism. It

works according to a logic that has essentially the same structure as natural selection: random

operant behaviour provides the original variety corresponding to random mutation, memory

plays the role of inheritance, and reinforcement, by increasing the probability of recurrence,

takes on the role of selection. In the process of learning, a number of other emotions may

intervene: anxiety, emulation, frustration, and so forth. Phoebe Ellsworth describes the change in

emotional response that we can expect when a situation is encountered over and over:

Appraisals of a truly novel situation, except for the few biologically built-in

stimuli, are slower, less certain, and more conscious than they will be the 30th time

the situation is encountered, and the emotion less well-defined. Babies, who

encounter novel situations every day, look to their parents for information about

what to feel... By the time a person has experienced a situation several times, and

it is more familiar, the emotional response is more automatic, and the person will

immediately experience the full-blown emotion — anger, for example, at the

person who has cut her off and taken her parking place – with little or no

awareness of the component appraisals (Frijda, 1986; Ellsworth & Scherer,

2003).” (Ellsworth 2013).

In short, we might say, normal human development consists in making the transition

from S2 to S1 performances.

§ 6 Epistemic Feelings

I turn now to consider emotions that are specifically involved in the process of reasoning.

Such emotions have come under scrutiny quite recently, in particular with the work of

Christopher Hookway, Catherine Elgin, and Paul Thagard (Hookway 2003, 2008; Elgin 2008;

Thagard 2006, 2008), and other philosophers whose essays collected in a volume devoted to

Emotions and Epistemology (Brun, Doğuoğlu, and Kuenzle 2008). But contemporary

philosophers were not the first to notice them. They have important antecedents, including Plato,

Descartes, Hume and Nietzsche. To recall just the first two: in the Meno, Socrates celebrates the

despair of which Meno complains, by pointing out that it is, together with doubt, an essential

stage in the rejection of falsehood and the acquisition of knowledge. Later in the same dialogue,

the slave-boy, when confronted with a number of erroneous answers to the geometrical problem

set by Socrates, finally experiences the feeling of rightness that goes with recognition of the

correct answer. As for Descartes, he declares that wonder is the “first of the passions”; doubt is

what drives his investigation, and the feeling of certainty, which he labels “clarity and

distinctness” becomes the very criterion of truth. It doesn’t work out, alas; and others, including

Hume and Nietzsche, are less sanguine about the connection of feelings to truth, but emphatic

about the primacy of feeling over reason.

A wide range of feelings may be triggered in the pursuit of knowledge. They include

hope, frustration, anger, envy, fear, greed, and many others. But for the most part these are not

triggered by anything specific to reasoning or inquiry as such: they are associated with the perils

involved in any sort of undertaking. In the rest of this essay, I shall be concentrating on a range

of states I shall refer to as “epistemic feelings”. I choose that term in preference to two others

that might stake a claim: ‘intuitions’, and ‘emotions’. I avoid the latter, because to speak of

emotions may not sound altogether natural in the light of common usage, simply because some

might contest (though they would not be obviously right) that our epistemic feelings never

involve the sort of physiological upheavals typical of genuine emotions. And yet simply to speak

of ‘intuitions’ would seem too weak. The terminology, however, is of minor importance: it

remains that these are indeed affective phenomena essentially involved in the pursuit of

epistemic aims.

Feelings specifically involved in reasoning can be divided into four types, classified in

terms of their object, and of the epistemic operation to which they contribute.

(1) Wonder motivates inquiry, but presupposes no specific prior belief, and need not

target any existing supposition. While it may be evoked by the contemplation of a particular

statement or state of affairs, it can function as a completely general spur to seeking knowledge.

(2) Doubt also motivates inquiry but bears on hypotheses already entertained.

(3) Certainty bears on specific beliefs; it is, in a sense, antithetical to inquiry, in that it

freezes any further quest for evidence or argument. On the other hand, it frees us for action by

stamping certain facts or values as appropriate ones to be acting upon. The feeling of rightness

seems to belong in the same general category.

(4) The Feeling of Knowing bears on specific propositions, but is unable to specify them:

it is a kind of indication that it is worth the time and effort to keep trying to recall something that

is in fact “somewhere in my head”. There is evidence that the Feeling of Knowing is a fairly

reliable indicator of something’s being available to memory even if it is not currently retrievable;

but like the other three, it can be manipulated to fall into error (Koriat 2000).

I have discussed these at greater length in (de Sousa 2008); their role is fairly obvious,

and I will say little more. Instead, I will end by noting some more unusual connections between

emotions and reasoning. These concern the sort of emotion that we might be tempted to call

moods rather than emotions.

One such link is suggested by experiments that provide evidence that perceptual

estimates, e.g., of size, are made more accurately by people who are depressed than by those who

are not (Alloy and Abramson 1979; Carson 2001). Although this affects very concrete judgments

of very specific quantities, this seems to lend some support to the intuition, reported by many

depressives, that their condition affords a deeper insight into the nature of life (Dollimore 2001).

On the other hand, as Keith Oatley notes, citing Alice Isen (1990), when they are happy “people

are more generous to others, they make more creative word associations, they more easily solve

certain kinds of problems, etc. When they are sad or depressed people tend to have previous sad

episodes from their lives coming to mind” (Oatley 1996). Such effects of emotional states are

manifestly not directly influencing conclusions arrived at from given premises; they appear, we

might say, rather to grease the wheels of inference.

Something similar, but more difficult to interpret and rather more arcane, was also

brought out in research conducted by Keith Oatley and his students. Here mood appears to affect

neither the disposition to accept a conclusion, nor the choice of premises, nor even the feeling of

rightness in the process of inference. Rather it seems to influence the order in which a piece of

reasoning is presented. It seems that emotions influence our style rather than the specifics of our

reasoning.

After giving subjects a story to read, describing a caddish man behaving badly, the

experimenters asked the subjects a number of interpretative questions. They also assessed the

readers’ emotional state. In the following quotation, “forward chaining” describes reasoning

which is close to the standard in which reasons are placed before the conclusion; “backward

chaining” refers to statements in which the conclusion was laid out first, and followed by the

reasons for it.

Among our participants we found anger, sadness and, less frequently, disgust.

Participants who became sad engaged predominantly in backward chaining.

Participants who became angry engaged predominantly in forward chaining. This

difference was significant at the p < 0.02 level for each of the three interpretive

questions. In other words, each reader was emotionally affected by the story, and

his or her mode of thinking became different depending on what emotion was

experienced. Sadness is a mode in which one starts from the current state and

reasons backwards to try and understand its causes. Anger is a state in which one

reasons forwards from the current state about what to do next. Our result is from a

single study. We nevertheless think it suggestive that distinctive modes of

reasoning were associated with specific emotions (Oatley 2002, 53–4).

I find this particularly intriguing, because the way that the emotion is affecting the

reasoning in this case is quite different from what one has been led to expect. It affects a

style of presentation, rather than what is accepted or what is inferred. And precisely

because it seems to affect a level in the process of argument that has little or no epistemic

importance, it provides one more indication of the depth of the involvement of emotion in

reason.

§7. Summary and Conclusion

It is generally accepted that both the virtues and the drawbacks of the emotions stem from

their basic function: to facilitate the body’s preparation when it needs to respond efficiently to

some relatively common life situation, affecting core concerns, in which the combination of

evolutionary adaptation and learning has found it worthwhile to set up a relatively stereotyped

strategy. That basic function requires them to straddle whatever wobbly line divides S1 from S2

processes. But it is not easy to say precisely how this general principle applies to the different

ways in which emotions are involved in reasoning. Both moods and emotions seem to be

causally influential in generating some of the systematic mistakes that have been uncovered by

the work of Tversky, Kahneman, and their associates: sometimes, the only emotion that appears

to be involved – if indeed it can be called an emotion at all – is a preference for the lazy option.

But some more specific influences, such as the curious power of familiarity to breed liking and

conviction, do seem to fall in with the general principle that emotions dispose us to respond in

the most efficient way, when a quick and dirty (or “fast and frugal8”) response is required. I

argued that specific epistemic feelings, including wonder, doubt, certainty, the feeling of

rightness and the feeling of knowing, have very specific roles, either in stamping a kind of seal

of approval on the steps of an argument or the conclusion of an inference, or, on the contrary in

spurring further enquiry. In some cases, such as the different styles of presentations of arguments

favoured by sadness and anger, the role of emotions is both more subtle and more difficult to

fathom.

8 The former expression is preferred by those who, like Kahneman and Tversky, stress our proclivity to systematic error; the latter is used by those, notably (Gigerenzer et al., 1999; Dijksterhuis et al 2006) who insist that intuitive thinking is generally adaptive, and almost always more efficient in attaining correct decisions than S2 processes of explicit deliberation.

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Type Goal DoF Intent’l State Processes inducing change

Epistemic Truth M→W Belief Intuition, perception, reasoning.

Practical State of affairsM←W Action Deliberation

Evaluative Good M←W Desire Intuition, practical reason

Emotional Appropriate M→W Emotion Imagination, perception, reasoning

TABLE 1: Domains of Rationality

TABLE 2 (from Evans 2008 p. 257

FIGURE 1:

Kahneman’s picture of the causes and consequences of Cognitive Ease