The Role of Emotions and Trust in Generating Epistemic Reasons

This paper examines the relevance of emotions to epistemology, particularly the role of emotion in generating epistemic reasons for belief. According to Ronald de Sousa, “Emotions provide a framework for our beliefs, bringing some into the spotlight and relegating others to the shade... Emotions are, in fact, patterns of attention” (1987, p. 243). Emotions generate salience by screening information and influencing how we interpret evidence. In this paper I examine the consequences of understanding emotions thusly in light of a plausible (epistemic) internalist awareness constraint on epistemic reasons (i.e., evidence possession). According to the constraint, an evidential consideration E is an epistemic reason to believe P only if one sees that E evidentially supports P – that is, only if one apprehends the connection between E and P. I argue that emotions not only sometimes explain why we believe what we do; emotions, and trust, in particular, sometimes partially determine the evidence we possess, hence, the epistemic reasons we have for believing propositions.