Can We Know When to Trust Our Emotions in the Pursuit of Knowledge? Consider History and One Other Area of Knowledge.

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6. Can we know when to trust our emotions in the pursuit of knowledge? Consider history and one other area of knowledge. This essay title poses a question about the trustworthiness of emotions in the pursuit of knowledge. But what is an emotion? Should we trust it when we aim to know something? Emotions are usually described as the subjective feeling, mood or passion experienced by an individual, who is involved in a situation. Emotions are subjective because one person may experience the same situation with another and yet feel differently. For example, whereas one person is listening to a song and may be emotionally unaffected, another may cry because he/she feels moved. Furthermore, emotions can also be objective as well as universal since they can be found in all cultures and all ages. For instance, in the psychology class we learned that when photos of individuals expressing certain emotions through facial expressions were shown to a sample of people from diverse cultures, that sample matched correctly each photo to its corresponding emotion. Finally, a third perspective is that emotions are not merely subjective or objective but inter-subjective, what is commonly referred to as “mixed feelings”. For example, as IB students we will leave our families to study abroad and even though, on the one hand, we are thrilled by this exciting new experience, on the other hand, we feel sadness because of being separated from our families, thus experiencing a ‘bittersweet’ emotion. As a result, if we consider various situations and moments in our lives, we will realize that in many cases what we experience contains an amount of emotional disposition. Indeed, it is quite difficult actually to imagine someone without emotions or feelings. Human beings may not be able to express or control their emotions but this does not necessarily mean that they do not have any. How do

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