Belief as Emotion

Belief as Emotion argues that belief is a type of emotion, where emotions are understood as irreducibly blended states that transcend the cognitive/non-cognitive divide, containing representational, motivational and phenomenological elements. On this view to believe is to feel that the way one represents the world is accurate and this feeling is a kind of evaluation. This view helps explain a number of puzzling phenomena in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion. Further, thinking of beliefs as emotions helps us to understand the ethics of belief. It offers a better understanding of what are sometimes called “edge cases” of beliefs, ones that seem belief-like but that are hard to fit into most standard pictures of belief. These include delusions, religious and political attitudes, and belief in the context of trust. Given their complicated relationship to evidence and action, many theorists claim that such attitudes should not be categorized as beliefs, but as a different mental state. Belief as Emotion does not force us to exclude states as real beliefs that we pre-reflectively think of as beliefs, and that does not require us to “outsource” the work belief seems to do to other mental states. The view also illuminates the phenomena of self-deception, implicit bias, and deep disagreement. Ideal emotional maintenance is complex; thinking of beliefs as emotions acknowledges and embraces this complexity of our doxastic lives.

1 - Introduction
2 - Belief as a Blended State
3 - Defending Doxasticism about Delusions
4 - Defending Doxasticism about Religious Conviction and Political Ideology
5 - Trusting is Believing
6 - Implicit attitudes and Self-Deception: Examples of Emotional Conflict
7 - Deep Disagreement and Belief Alteration

Miriam Schleifer McCormick is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Richmond. Her central research interests focus on the nature and norms of belief. This interest has also led her to think and write about reasons, agency, hope, imagination, and emotions. She has published articles on issues at the cross section of epistemology and ethics, and is the author of Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief (Routledge, 2015) She is a researcher in the normativity and affectivity axis of GRIN and collaborating member of the ethical foundation axis at CRÉ, research centres based at the Université de Montréal.