ABSTRACT
Like perceptions, emotions are usually considered to be passive mental states with both phenomenal and intentional aspects. It is now widely believed that emotions have indispensable epistemic roles to play in our cognitive lives. To cash out their epistemic value, philosophers sometimes liken emotional experience to perceptual experience and claim that emotions can provide us with evaluative knowledge of the world. This claim has, however, been subjected to some severe objections, leading some theorists to deny that emotions can, like perceptions, be reasons. This chapter argues that many of these objections arise from a failure to appreciate certain features of reasons, especially the distinction between the reasons there are and the reasons one possesses. After criticizing some of the attempts to show that emotions can function as reason, it will be shown how the adoption of the dispositional account of reason-possession can defuse the objections raised against the evidential value of emotions.
