Do emotions enable us to see things in their true light, as we would not be able to do if we were not capable of experiencing emotion? I think that our intuitions tend to draw us in two apparently opposing directions. On the one hand, we are inclined to say that emotional experience can sometimes tell us things about the world that reason alone will miss. That, one might think, is why we evolved as creatures capable of emotion. Yet, on the other hand, we are inclined to say that our emotions can and do profoundly distort our view of things: in anger or jealousy, for example, when the red mist comes down over the eyes, and we can feel the blood pulsing in the temples, things look other than the way they are, and, accordingly, our emotions can mislead us profoundly; literature is replete with examples.

A cheap resolution of these competing intuitions would be to say that there are cases and cases: sometimes our emotions help us to gain empirical knowledge, and sometimes they hinder us. No doubt this is true so far as it goes, but I think there is more to be said than just that.

Perception and Reason
Empirical thinking is ‘answerable to experience’ in the sense that perceptual experiences can themselves provide reasons for empirical belief and judgement. The content of our perceptions—our perceiving things to be thus and so—are, however, only prima facie reasons for the related empirical belief, the belief that things are indeed thus and so. A prima facie reason is a consideration that appears at first sight to be a reason (using the term ‘reason’ in the standard normative sense), but which may turn out, in fact, not to be a reason. For example, your seeing something as red or as square is a prima facie reason for believing it to be red or to be square. But if you were wearing distorting lenses that made blue things look red or rectangular things look square, then your seeing something as red or as square is not a reason (that is, not a good reason) for believing it to be so.

Let me make one further point about ‘ordinary’ perception, before turning to perception and the emotions, as it will be relevant in what is to follow. I want to take here a fairly wide notion of perception under which the concepts that are deployed in perceptual receptivity—call them perceptual concepts—can also be, in a sense, theoretical concepts. The point can be made most easily in relation to some sort of expertise, of the kind that is involved in playing chess or in a scientific activity. In chess, when one is first learning the skill, it is very hard, if not impossible, to see what is happening on the chessboard: that, for example, one’s queen is being threatened by the bishop. One has to try to work it out through agonizing steps of reasoning, thinking through each move individually. But after experience and training, the expert will be able to see that his queen is threatened: the phenomenology is visual, and the judgement is spontaneous, without any sort of conscious inferential process. The perceptual capacity has become second nature for the expert. Yet, if he asks himself why he sees that his queen is threatened, he will be able (or at least ought to be able) to think of reasons which support his perceptual judgment. But, as we saw from the preceding paragraph in respect of practical deliberation, this question ought consciously to arise for him if and only if its doing so is important for success—in this case winning the game. Similarly, an experienced scientist will be able to see the photon in the cloud chamber, and again, if appropriate to his project, he will be able to think of reasons why he sees things this way. In both these examples, then, the concepts involved in the perceptual contents (that the queen is threatened; that there is a photon in the cloud chamber) will be embedded in a substantial theory. So concepts can be both perceptual and theoretical, and we can allow that the chess expert and the experienced scientist see things differently from the way their inexperienced counterparts see things. Moreover, chess experts and experienced scientists should aim to be intellectually virtuous, able to rely on their habits and dispositions of thought so that doubts and questions arise about the content of their perceptions when and only when they should.

Emotion, perception and reason
Let me begin by introducing a term: emotion-proper property. An emotion-proper property is the property that is proper to, or ‘belongs to’, a type of emotion. For example, being frightening is the emotion-proper property for fear. Other examples are being disgusting (proper to disgust), being shameful (proper to shame), being enviable (proper to envy), and being worthy of pride (proper to pride). Some emotions and emotion-proper properties will be (roughly) prudential, and some will be (roughly) moral, and some will be both.

When we are confronted by things in the environment, and respond emotionally to them, we also, as part of the same experience, typically perceive those things as having the emotion-proper property. For example, if, as a caring parent, you see the out-of-control toboggan hurtling straight for your child, you feel fear, and you see the toboggan as being frightening. Or if you feel disgust at a maggot-infested piece of meat, you see the meat as being disgusting. Or if you are at a party and someone says something to you and you feel angry at the remark, you hear the remark as being insulting. Our ability to perceive things as having these emotion-proper properties will be more or less a matter of training and experience, depending on all sorts of factors which I need not go into here (recognizing maggot-ridden meat as disgusting takes little training or experience; recognizing the offensiveness of certain linguistic expressions or certain ways of behaving at table are things that a child has to be taught). But, drawing on the earlier discussion of perceptual and theoretical concepts, it need not be contentious that, if we do have the requisite training or experience, we can indeed perceive things as having such properties.

In the typical case, the experience of responding emotionally to things in the environment, combined in phenomenology with the perception of the object as having the emotion-proper property, will also involve the experience of the emotion and the perception as being reasonable or justified. For example, when you feel fear, and see the out-of-control toboggan as being frightening, you take the experience to be reasonable or justified. The non-typical cases are not like this: these are the occasions where one realises at the time that one’s emotional response is not reasonable or justified. For example, you feel afraid of the mouse in the corner of the room, and yet at the same time you know that your feelings are not justified. In these non-typical cases, although the object might still seem to have the emotion-proper property (the mouse does seem to be frightening), one is not inclined, as one is in the typical case, to consider one’s emotional response to be justified. There is, thus, the possibility, which may, of course, not be actualised, of acknowledging, in one’s own case, and at the same time as the emotional experience takes place, that things are not really as they seem: the mouse seems frightening, but you know that it is not, for you know that your fear is not justified.

it is typical of emotional experience to consider one’s emotion, and one’s perception of the object of one’s emotion as having the emotion-proper property, to be justified. So far so good. But what if, without your knowing it, your emotion is unjustified, and the object of your emotion does not have the emotion-proper property that it seems to have? (Perhaps you think you have the right emotional disposition but you do not; or perhaps your mind is subject to other undue influences that you are not aware of.) In such cases, one’s emotions can distort perception and reason by skewing the epistemic landscape to make it cohere with the emotional experience.

when we are afraid, we tend unknowingly to seek out features of the object of our fear that will justify the fear—features that would otherwise (that is, if we were not already afraid) seem relatively harmless. This is surely part of what is behind the commonsense intuition that our emotions can mislead us: they are passions, which, like idées fixes, we can be in the grip of.

The skewing process can be continuous whilst the emotion is in place, operating on new information as it comes in. One’s emotions and emotionally-held perceptual judgements ought to be open to be shown to be wrong by new evidence, but when new evidence does emerge, one tends not only to be insensitive to that evidence, but also, for the sake of internal coherence, to doubt the reliability of the source of that new evidence.

An extreme case is Leontes in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, who becomes jealous of his wife Hermione, and is convinced that he has been cuckolded by his boyhood friend Polixenes. Although his jealousy is not justified, everything now seems to him to justify his jealousy in what has suddenly become an emotionally skewed epistemic landscape: the way Hermione and Polixenes behave together; the sudden uncertainty about whether his daughter looks like him; the disappearance of his previously-trusted Camillo, who is now a ‘false villain’. He even rejects the evidence of the oracle of Apollo, that ‘Hermione is chaste; Polixenes blameless; Camillo a true subject; Leontes a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten’. Apollo, angry at having his word doubted, immediately wreaks his terrible revenge by bringing about the death of Leontes’ son and wife. Only then does Leontes finally come to recognize that he has ‘too much believ’d his own suspicion’; and then it is too late.

A possible objection to my position here is that there is nothing special about the emotional case: people are generally subject to all sorts of well-documented cognitive deficiencies, such as the confirmatory bias, and the emotional case is just an instance of this. One response to this objection, which I find independently attractive but will not pursue here, is that perhaps more of these cognitive deficiencies can be traced back to the emotions than might at first be thought. The other response, which I will put forward here, is that there is something special about the emotional case: emotions, and emotionally-held perceptual judgements about things as having emotion-proper properties, are more intransigent than are their non-emotional counterparts, and thus the skewing of the epistemic landscape (for the sake of internal coherence) tends to be towards the preservation of the emotionally-held idées fixes at the cost of the unemotional thoughts.

Now, given the generality of the normative requirement of intellectual virtue that one be disposed, when and only when appropriate, to reflect on, criticize, and if necessary change our way of thinking of things, this requirement surely ought to include a disposition to reflect critically, when and only when appropriate, on the way that one’s emotions can have this skewing effect. But doing this is not so easy, largely because of the possibility that one’s epistemic landscape has already been skewed without one’s knowing it; so, like Leontes, one is not in a position, from the here and now of emotional experience, to take the dispassionate view of the evidence that the epistemic requirement demands. The problem is a very familiar one to everyday life: how to satisfy this epistemic requirement when one is in the swim of emotional experience. Consider this example. You feel in despair about your job. The job seems hopeless, and it seems to be hopeless for all sorts of reasons which seem to justify your feelings of despair: there are no decent prospects for promotion; most of your colleagues are people with whom you really have very little in common; you do not seem to be able to get the work done properly; the journey to and from home is a nightmare; and so on. Your friends, not in the here and now of this emotional experience, assure you that things only seem this black because you are feeling so despairing (you used not to be like this; perhaps some Prozac might help?). You try to stand back and see things as others do (maybe things will look a bit brighter in the morning). And you might succeed in doing this to some extent. But you could still think that it is your friends who are wrong: they believe these things because they do not see that things really are hopeless and how right you are to be in despair (Prozac might lift the despair, but the job will still be hopeless). The question remains: Is it you, or is it the job?

This leads me directly to a further, deeper difficulty that presses on those of us who are, prudentially or morally, less than fully virtuous. So far, my focus has been on cases where one is aware through introspection that one is experiencing a particular sort of emotion; in the example just discussed, you are aware that you are in despair. But it would be a grave mistake to think that our emotions are always transparent to introspection in this way. To begin with, one can sometimes not be sure what emotion it is that one is experiencing—it might be fear or it might be excitement as you approach the helter-skelter; the two emotions are phenomenologically very similar. Secondly, one can have an emotion without noticing it—one might be angry with someone and not realise it until it is drawn to your attention. (A sort of limiting case here is emotion that is repressed in the Freudian sense.) Thirdly, without one’s knowledge, an emotion can, through what Jon Elster (1999) has nicely called alchemy or transmutation, be changed into a different emotion, or into some other kind of psychological state altogether. And lastly, emotions can continue to resonate in one’s mental economy long after they are, as it might seem, ‘over’. In all these sorts of case (and others besides), emotion can distort reason in the ways I have been discussing. And this distorting effect can extend to judgements and beliefs that do not, in virtue of their contents, reveal themselves to be ‘emotional’—that is to say, that do not themselves refer to emotion-proper properties as such. But now, one is in the worrying position of not knowing what emotions, if any, are at work, and what judgements and beliefs, if any, have been affected. One can therefore be inclined to think that one is being ‘dispassionate’ in one’s judgment when one is not, or to think mistakenly that one sort of emotion is at work rather than another. Thus one has no way of knowing how to direct one’s watchfulness. Constant checking would not only be practically paralysing; it would also be practically useless. One is in the position of having a normative requirement of intellectual virtue, which one knows of and acknowledges to be reasonable, but which one does not know how to satisfy.

Of course, if one is, in fact, fully virtuous prudentially and morally, then there will be no skewing of the epistemic landscape in this respect, and the requirement of intellectual virtue will, de facto, be met. But this is only superficially satisfactory, because, if one has, without knowing it, become less than fully virtuous prudentially or morally, the requirement will still seem to be met. And a falling away from full virtue is not always introspectively obvious. Moreover, some thoroughly unvirtuous prudential and moral dispositions involve, if they are deeply embedded psychologically, thinking that one is not in such a state; being self-righteous or being self-satisfied are perhaps examples.

Let me give an example of the difficulty of knowing whether one’s emotion is skewing one’s epistemic landscape. A long time ago you were very angry with a colleague at work because he failed to turn up to a meeting that you were chairing, and at which his presence was essential. How could he do this when he promised to be there! You thought your anger to be thoroughly justified, on the grounds of his being so unreliable and inconsiderate. The following day, though, he came to see you with a full explanation, and was extremely apologetic. His son had been taken suddenly ill, and had to be rushed to hospital, and there was no chance of getting to a ‘phone; and so on. You put your anger behind you, as you should do, realising that your anger, although understandable at the time, was not justified, for he really had a good reason not to be there, and a good reason why he could not give you advance warning. Later still—much later—you are asked to provide a reference about this colleague. Without your realising it, the content of what you say is affected by the residue of your anger, which still lies deep in the recesses of your mind. Of course, you do not go so far as to state outright that he is unreliable and inconsiderate, for your memory of the incident is at best only hazy; and anyway, as it later emerged, he was neither unreliable nor inconsiderate on that occasion. But still, unknown to you, for you think that you are being fair and dispassionate in what you say, your reference is not as favourable as it would have been if the incident had never taken place. Aware of the requirement of intellectual virtue, which is a virtue that you aspire to, you ask yourself, ‘Am I emotionally involved here? Because if I am, I should be especially watchful.’ But the answer comes back ‘No, I am not emotionally involved’; moreover, you might sense a certain puzzlement as to what sort of emotion might be at work on this occasion. And if you were reminded of the long-past incident, you might insist that any anger that you felt all that time ago is no longer at work, distorting reason.

The above is copied from the book Emotion, Reason and Virtue by Peter Goldie, University of Manchester and were excerpted from a PDF file that can be found at the top of this Google search: Emotional Feelings: Are They a Source of Knowledge (copy/paste into Google)


TL;DR - Emotions can easily distort our understanding of things, and furthermore we are incapable of knowing when this is happening. Therefore it's problematic to call anything garnered from emotion or intuition knowledge.