How does doubt come about? What are the mechanisms responsible for our inclinations to reassess propositions and collect further evidence to support or reject them? In this paper, I approach this question by focusing on what might be considered a distorting mirror of unreasonable doubt, namely the pathological doubt of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder. Individuals with OCD exhibit a form of persistent doubting, indecisiveness, and over-cautiousness at pathological levels :743–758, 1992; Reed in Obsessional experience and compulsive behaviour: a cognitive-structural approach, (...) Academic Press, Cambridge, 1985; Tolin et al. in Cogn Ther Res 27:657–669, 2003). I argue that the failure in OCD is of an affective nature, involving both excessive epistemic anxiety and hyperactive feelings of uncertainty. I further argue that our adaptive disposition to inquire about the right matters—that is, about propositions which are both epistemically risky and imply harmful possibilities—might depend on these affective mechanisms. (shrink)

Emotions might contribute to our being rational cognitive agents. Anxiety – and more specifically epistemic anxiety – provides an especially interesting case study into the role of emotion for adaptive cognition. In this paper, I aim at clarifying the epistemic contribution of anxiety, and the role that ill-calibrated anxiety might play in maladaptive epistemic activities which can be observed in psychopathology. In particular, I argue that this emotion contributes to our ability to adapt our cognitive efforts to how we represent (...) the practical factors relevant to the task at hand, by sig- naling the need for increased cognitive processing and evidence gathering in high- stakes situations. I hypothesize that dysfunctional or ill-calibrated epistemic anxiety might play an important role in the motivation driving persons with obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) to invest high amounts of cognitive resources into the resolution of apparently simple and innocuous questions. As I argue, OCD might be conceived as a case in which epistemic anxiety is inappropriately elicited, represent- ing these as high-stakes questions, and inadequately signaling a need for cognition. In this paper, I thus make use of the concept of (epistemic) anxiety as developed in the philosophy of emotion and in epistemology, to propose an account of the role of anxiety in the pathological doubt that is central to obsessive-compulsive disorder. (shrink)

Feeling confused can sometimes lead us to give up on the task, frustrated. What is less emphasized is that confusion may also promote happy (epistemic) endings to our inquiries. It has recently been argued that confusion motivates effortful investigative behaviors which can help us acquire hard-to-get epistemic goods (DiLeo et al., 2019; D’Mello & Graesser, 2012). While the motivational power of confusion and its benefits for learning has been uncovered in recent years, the exact nature of the phenomenon remains obscure. (...) In this paper we attempt to shed light on the nature and epistemic value of an experience we are all familiar with: the experience of being confused at an object, a statement, etc. We first review the psychological literature on confusion, where it is most often considered to be an epistemic emotion. We then propose a refined account of confusion, by drawing on the literature on metacognitive or noetic feelings, both in psychology and in the philosophy of mind. In particular, we claim that confusion centrally involves the experience of the limits of one’s cognitive capacities, because it results from a monitoring of our cognitive activities as we encounter a cognitive obstacle while processing a given content. Finally we show how our account may explain findings about the role of the experience of confusion in motivating deeper inquiry into complex problems and bringing about epistemic success in these cases. (shrink)

For creatures like us, entertaining possible future scenarios of how our life might play out is often accompanied or “charged” with emotions like hope and anxiety. What will interest me in this article is whether the epistemic profile of hope and anxiety, and in particular the fact that they are directed at uncertain outcomes, might pose a threat to the stability of their valence. Hope and anxiety are not emotions which relate us to evaluative properties of actual events, they relate (...) us to evaluative properties of relevant possibilities (Gordon, 1969; Kurth, 2018; Benton, 2019). I will present and discuss two philosophical accounts according to which hope and anxiety do not have a proprietary and consistent valence. According to the first account, anxiety is an intrinsically ambivalent emotion, as a result of involving an awareness of conflicting possibilities or ways in which the future might unfold (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2015). According to the second, hope is not a strictly positive emotion, as certain specific occurrences of hope are negatively valenced (Stockdale, 2019). Finally, I argue that an evaluative theory of valence helps us clearly conceive of hope and anxiety as two polar opposite experiences of uncertainty. (shrink)

The aim of this collection is to show how work in the analytic philosophical tradition can shed light on the nature, value, and experience of anxiety. Contrary to widespread assumptions, anxiety is not best understood as a mental disorder, or an intrinsically debilitating state, but rather as an often valuable affective state which heightens our sensitivity to potential threats and challenges. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, learning about anxiety can be relevant for debates, not only in the philosophy (...) of emotion, but also in epistemology, value theory, and the philosophy of psychopathology. In this introductory article, we also show that there is still much to discover about the relevance that anxiety may have for moral action, self-understanding, and mental health. (shrink)

Incessant checking is undeniably problematic from a practical point of view. But what is epistemically wrong with checking again (and again)? The starting assumption for this paper is that establishing what goes wrong when individuals check their stove ten times in a row requires understanding the nature of the doxastic attitude that compulsive re-checkers are in, as they go back to perform another check. Does the re-checker know that the stove is off, and is thus looking for more of what (...) she already has (Whitcomb, D. 2010. “Curiosity was Framed.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (3): 664–687.)? Or is she an inquirer who repeatedly loses her knowledge and finds herself inquiring again and again into the same question (Friedman, J. 2019. “Checking Again.” Philosophical Issues 29 (1): 84–96.)? I present what I see as the three main hypotheses currently available, and propose a refinement to Taylor's ‘what-if questioning’ account (2020). (shrink)

By manifesting dysfunctions of fundamental psychological mechanisms such as emotions, reasoning, and language, symptoms of mental disorders can inform us on their nature and functions. In this volume, Valentina Cardella and Amelia Gangemi bring together a collection of articles which draw from psychopathology in order to further our study of the human mind. Contributors include philosophers of mind and language, clinical psychologists, and a historian, all applying their respective methodological tools with the aim of learning from mental disorders about the (...) fragile equilibrium that supports our mental capacities. (shrink)

Checking is one of the most common compulsive actions performed by patients with Obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) (APA, 2013; Abramowitz, McKay, Taylor, 2008). Incessant checking is undeniably problematic from a practical point of view. But what is epistemically wrong with checking again (and again)? The starting assumption for this paper is that establishing what goes wrong when individuals check their stove ten times in a row requires understanding the nature of the doxastic attitude that compulsive re-checkers are in, as they (...) go back to perform another check. Does the re-checker know that the stove is off, and is thus looking for more of what she already has? Or is she an inquirer who repeatedly loses her knowledge and finds herself inquiring again and again into the same question? In this paper I present and discuss what I see as the three main hypotheses currently available on the market, and I suggest a refinement. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a trend in psychiatry to try and explain disorders of action in terms of an over-reliance on the habitual mode of action. In particular, it has been hypothesized that compulsions in obsessive-compulsive disorder are driven by maladaptive habits. In this paper, I argue that this view of obsessive-compulsive disorder does not fit the phenomenology of the disorder in many patients and that a more refined conceptualization of habit is likely to be helpful in clarifying (...) the distinctions between disorders of action. There are thus two aims to this paper. The first is to highlight the issues pertaining to the view that compulsions are the result of an over-reliance on the habitual mode of action, leading to a loss of agentive control. The second aim is to examine the view of agentive control implicit in those accounts and see how other conceptions of agentive control might do a better job at accounting for the distinct ways in which persons suffering from pathologies of action may be said to lack control. (shrink)

According to contemporary philosophical accounts of hope, a hopeful emotion involves an element of imagination as input, part, or output of hope. A typical description of a hopeful episode often goes with mental imagery or immersion into the hoped-for scenario: as Ariel is hoping to win the dance competition on Saturday night, he projects himself in the scenario where he visualizes his name appearing on the screen display, quasi-hears the crowd cheering, feels proud, and starts thinking about the national dance (...) competition. This raises the question: how does hope exactly interact with the processes required to produce a mental image or even an immersive exploration of the desired reality? This is the question we tackle in our paper. Rather than putting forward a new account of the nature of hope, we explore the interactions between hope and the different kinds of imagination. (shrink)

In this article I examine the role of anxiety in our motivation to reassess our epistemic states, by taking as a starting point a proposal put forward by Levy, according to which anxiety is responsible for the ruminations and worries about threatening possibilities that we sometimes get caught up into in our everyday life. Levy’s claim is that these irrational persistent thoughts about possible states of affairs are best explained by anxiety, rather than by beliefs, degrees of belief, or other (...) mental states. I will take Levy’s article as a starting point into my study of the role of anxiety in our inclinations to question the epistemic quality of our cognitive states. While I believe that Levy is right in directing our attention to the role of anxiety in these cases, his claim calls for further explanation into the nature of anxiety, and into the mechanisms through which anxiety generates these doubts. Although the relation between anxiety and doubt has already been highlighted, there has been little effort to elaborate on the mechanisms through which an affective state like anxiety generates a motivation to reassess our beliefs. This paper is an attempt at providing such an elaboration. Clarifying the role of anxiety in these phenomena will lead me to revise a common assumption about the interactions between anxiety and higher-level cognitive processes, such as the ones involved in representing hypothetical threatening scenarios through mental imagery. (shrink)

In this essay, we tackle the misconception that panic is simply a state of being « overwhelmed by your fear. » Panic, in our view, is not an extreme fear that necessarily pushes the person into dysfunctional, counterproductive and irrational behaviors. On the contrary, as we will try to show here, it is an emotion in its own right that has its own cognitive and motivational functions. We will analyze panic here as a reaction to a danger perceived as major, (...) imminent and without clear solution, in the sense that the subject does not have a determined action plan to react to the danger. Panic thus implies special access to certain information or certain facts – a perception or apprehension of danger and its precise properties – and it is in this that it has a cognitive function. On the motivational level, we will defend the idea that panic involves tendencies to action appropriate to the situation as it is perceived. Contrary to popular opinion and that of philosophers,we will therefore propose away of conceiving panic as being able to be functional and thus, rational, insofar as this emotion helps us to reach our goals given the means of which we dispose. Contrary to what we might think, in some situations it is worth panicking. (shrink)

Why do thoughts involving harm and damage trigger guilt in certain individuals and not in others? The significance of this question comes into view when considering the medical and psychological literature on patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Patients with OCD feel guilt in response to having certain recurring, negative thoughts whose content evoke scenarios of harm and damage. This, however—at least in most readings of what those thoughts consist of—is puzzling. The transition from having a thought about being the source (...) of harm popping up in one’s mind to feeling guilty is not straightforward, and it calls for explanation. Indeed, OCD appears to challenge a traditional picture of what guilt is all about... (shrink)

By manifesting dysfunctions of fundamental psychological mechanisms such as emotions, reasoning, and language, symptoms of mental disorders can inform us on their nature and functions. In this volume, Valentina Cardella and Amelia Gangemi bring together a collection of articles which draw from psychopathology in order to further our study of the human mind. Contributors include philosophers of mind and language, clinical psychologists, and a historian, all applying their respective methodological tools with the aim of learning from mental disorders about the (...) fragile equilibrium that supports our mental capacities. (shrink)

Les termes que nous utilisons pour décrire notre vie affective ont changé au fil des siècles. Un changement notoire est celui qui a mené d’une conception de l’affectivité centrée autour des “passions” à un discours basé sur l' “émotion” comme catégorie psychologique centrale (Dixon 2003, Rorty 1982). Ainsi, alors que la référence à des désordres émotionnels est omniprésente dans les manuels de psychopathologie, le concept de passion a largement disparu du glossaire psychiatrique. Certains auteurs défendent pourtant l’idée selon laquelle ces (...) deux concepts auraient chacun une place à part entière dans la psychopathologie contemporaine. Dans ce qui suit, nous tenterons à travers de nombreux exemples de montrer comment l'étude des états affectifs peut contribuer à la compréhension et à la catégorisation des troubles psychiques... (shrink)

My dissertation, entitled "The Anxious Inquirer: Emotions and Epistemic Uncertainty", concerns the relation between the epistemic attitude of doubt and the emotion of anxiety. In this dissertation, I propose a model of the affective architecture of doubt inspired in part by research in psychiatry on the persistent and recurring doubt of patients with Obsessive-compulsive disorder.