Evaluate The Ways in Which Emotion Might Enhance and/or Undermine Reasoning as a Way of Knowing Essay

To start this essay I will define the most important words as I understand them therefore emotion and reasoning will be defined and second I will explain the question. Emotion is what we feel as a reaction towards a person or situation for example: anger, love, and fear. Reasoning is logic, how we argument something, the way we make decisions or how we think and therefore it is how we react to situations. This question is asking us to explain how emotion can make it easier or harder to reason appropriately so it becomes a better or worse way of knowing. Emotion has a very big influence on most people’s way of reasoning sometimes it makes this reasoning more reliable and in other cases emotion makes it less reliable. In the following essay the question will be answered from both sites. Emotion might enhance and/or undermine reasoning in several ways for example when you are happy you reason in a positive way but if you are sad or in a bad mood you reasoning is more negative. For example a man that had been promoted in his job he has a car accident and his car is in a very bad state, he firstly will think about that his insurance will pay for the damage. In the other site if a man has been fired from his job and he has a car accident under the same conditions as that other man, the first thing he will think about is his bad luck and what he will do without his car and the last thing he will think about is about his insurance. Emotion might enhance reasoning as a way of knowing because it may encourage you to reason for example if someone really likes chemistry and enjoys the class, if the teacher asks a question then this person will reason faster to answer the question than a person that took the class only because the physics teacher didn’t accept him in the class. As well when a scientist is enthusiastic about doing an investigation because he loves the subject then he will do the experiment as accurate as he can but if he just does it because it is his job then he will do the experiment as fast as he can just to finish it. Emotion might also undermine reasoning because when emotions are involved people may do things wrongly without thinking about them correctly or without using any logic. A famous quote says â€Å"love makes blind† this means that love (an emotion) takes people to an unreal world and making their reasoning capacity limited. For example if a boy walks into a party and sees his girlfriend kissing his best friend and then she tells him that his best friend kissed her and she couldn’t push him away. Let’s say that the boy really loves his girlfriend then he will believe her even if the story is very unreal. This proves that emotion can make people reasoning unreliable and wrong. In my personal opinion I believe that emotion undermine reasoning as a way of knowing because it makes peoples logic limited and uncertain so the reasoning of this person is unreliable. Also emotions are not always encouraging for example let’s say a woman that works organizing parties lost her dog so she is depressed then she is not able to do her job because she can not think about anything apart from her lost dog. This proves that emotion is not very useful when it comes to reason.