While we're talking about unusual epistemic tools, emotion has a really bad reputation, but what people are criticizing is not emotion as a properly used tool, but its improper use.
The improper, oft-criticized use of emotion is saying, "I feel X is true" or "I want X to be true", hence "I believe X." This is clearly unreliable.
But consider the role emotion does properly play. "This is surprising," "Huh, that's funny," "I wonder why..." and "That can't be right." These positive and negative reactions to data are feelings. Curiosity, fascination, frustration at the impossible, the pain of unresolved paradox. Judging knowledge to be either trivia essentially interesting--final value judgements. These are emotions that push us to apply other epistemic tools to the right questions in the right ways.
I once suffered a mental illness that made it difficult for me to feel certain emotions. One of the most fascinating results of the experience was the degree to which my ability to reason degraded. Unable to distinguish the interesting from the uninteresting, the fascinating from the trivial, unmotivated to pursue and resolve impossibilities, I was unable to undertake even simple logical tasks such as debugging.
There is a popular notion that a disinterested party will provide the most accurate account of a phenomenon, the object being to avoid bias. I think this is only part of the story. True, an interested party fall pray to phenomena like confirmation bias. But a disinterested party will fall prey to analytical apathy, happy with slapdash, second-rate models and explanations. I believe the best work comes from a dialogue between people with diverse yet healthy emotional attachments to a problem and a commitment to intellectual honesty.
>I once suffered a mental illness that made it difficult for me to feel certain emotions. One of the most fascinating results of the experience was the degree to which my ability to reason degraded.
This helps reinforce a thought I've been playing around with since my 20's. It seems quite ridiculous to me that reason is set in conflict with emotion (a remnant, I believe, of the historical conflict of science contra religion in the west). It is much more likely that the ability to reason is a subset of emotion, i.e., reasoning is nothing more than the development of particular emotions working in concert. This conception is more aligned with how evolution actually operates (building upon the processes of before) rather than having to explain a "magical" reason which just appears out of nowhere in the human mind and dominates the animal nature.
Just a thought...I hope you were able to deal with your illness well.
The improper, oft-criticized use of emotion is saying, "I feel X is true" or "I want X to be true", hence "I believe X." This is clearly unreliable.
But consider the role emotion does properly play. "This is surprising," "Huh, that's funny," "I wonder why..." and "That can't be right." These positive and negative reactions to data are feelings. Curiosity, fascination, frustration at the impossible, the pain of unresolved paradox. Judging knowledge to be either trivia essentially interesting--final value judgements. These are emotions that push us to apply other epistemic tools to the right questions in the right ways.
I once suffered a mental illness that made it difficult for me to feel certain emotions. One of the most fascinating results of the experience was the degree to which my ability to reason degraded. Unable to distinguish the interesting from the uninteresting, the fascinating from the trivial, unmotivated to pursue and resolve impossibilities, I was unable to undertake even simple logical tasks such as debugging.
There is a popular notion that a disinterested party will provide the most accurate account of a phenomenon, the object being to avoid bias. I think this is only part of the story. True, an interested party fall pray to phenomena like confirmation bias. But a disinterested party will fall prey to analytical apathy, happy with slapdash, second-rate models and explanations. I believe the best work comes from a dialogue between people with diverse yet healthy emotional attachments to a problem and a commitment to intellectual honesty.