2

Belief as a Blended State

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This chapter will explain what it means to categorize belief as an emotion
and show that many of the prominent theories of emotion can accommodate
the idea that beliefs are emotions. In Section 2.1, I will elucidate what I take
the belief emotion to be, and in Section 2.2, I will address some potential
worries, and consider some implications of the view. I will then (in Section
2.3) consider how different theories of emotion would characterize belief
as an emotion. Having a clear understanding of what it means to believe on
this view will allow us, in subsequent chapters, to address the “bedfellow”
challenge discussed in Chapter 1. We will see how this view can defend
doxasticism about the “problematic states” that “are belief-​like in some re-
spect but not all respects” and that “fail to fully conform to the functional
role characteristic of belief ” (Bayne & Hattiangadi 2013, 125), and allow for
normative distinctions among these states. If beliefs are kinds of emotions,
then they are blended states and, as such, their relationship to evidence and
action is more complicated than the way typically characterized by contem-
porary philosophers.

2.1 The Belief Emotion

My suggestion that it is illuminating to think of beliefs as emotions may seem

to support the misguided view that all philosophers agree on how to best
characterize emotions. Yet one finds an array of competing theories, each
claiming to best capture the phenomena, and better address long-​standing is-
sues than their rivals. Despite their differences, however, one finds a striking
unity among philosophers of emotion when it comes to the following two
points. First, a vast majority reject both purely “judgmentalist” theories,
which equate emotions with evaluative judgments, as well as “feeling-​
theories,” which equate emotions with non-​cognitive (often automatic) reac-
tions to the environment, much like passive bodily sensations. Instead, they
view emotions as essentially blended states, as involving both feelings and

Belief as Emotion. Miriam Schleifer Mccormick, Oxford University Press. © Miriam Schleifer McCormick 2025.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780198875826.003.0002
16 BELIEF AS EMOTION

some kind of cognitive representation.1 As mentioned in Chapter 1, this is

not to say that emotions are a combination of mental states that can be re-
duced to their components.2 Blended states are analogous to other blends
where the blend has ontological priority to what can be abstracted from the

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blend. Water is not just a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, but the idea of
pure oxygen can be abstracted out of water.3
The second point of agreement centers on the desiderata of a theory of
emotion. A successful theory of emotion should be able to offer a unified pic-
ture of all the varied states that fall under the rubric of emotion: it should be
able to account for the possibility of young children and animals experien-
cing emotions, it should explain our normative assessments of emotions, and
it should be capable of explaining the phenomenon of recalcitrant emotions.
To repeat what I stated in Chapter 1: emotions offer such a wide tent, from
fear and anger to curiosity and contentment; there is room to include belief
as one of them.
One of the main obstacles for pure judgmentalist theories of emotion is
that they are unable to explain recalcitrant emotions in a satisfying way. If
I know that spiders are not dangerous, but still feel fear when I see a spider,
the judgmentalist would claim that the kind of irrationality here is simply
one of incoherence, having two contradictory beliefs that one recognizes
as contradictory: spiders are dangerous and spiders are not dangerous. As
Michael Brady points out, such a view “imputes too much irrationality to the
subject of emotional recalcitrance” (2009, 414). Having an emotion that one
recognizes as, in some sense, unwarranted is common and intelligible. What
these theories get right, however, is that emotions can be targets of normative
assessment, and that some kind of criticism is apt in the cases of recalcitrant

1 Some will allow that this cognitive element is a judgment, but others will call these elements

“construals” or “appraisals” of the world being a certain way, so as to stave off the worry of being
overly intellectual. For an overview of the literature and for some ways in which these ingredi-
ents are described, see De Sousa & Scarantino (2021); they end their entry by listing ten points
that emotion theorists agree on; they also state that “most of the dominant accounts in the phil-
osophy of emotions now qualify as hybrids of cognitivist and feeling theories.” For an overview
of the challenges that a number of theories face, see the first chapter of Tappolet (2016).
2 See Helm (2001) for further discussion on this point. He says of emotions that they “are uni-

tary and not compound states of evaluative feeling, states involving elements of both cognition
and conation simultaneously” (2001, 59). Helm realizes that describing emotions as feelings of
this very particular kind runs afoul of the cognitive–​conative divide—​i.e., the view that all states
must be either one or the other—​and argues that the divide should be rejected because an ad-
equate account of the phenomenology of emotions cannot be provided while it remains. I agree,
and one upshot of my view is that an adequate account of the phenomenology of belief cannot be
provided while it remains.
3 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this analogy.
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 17

emotions. This is very difficult to account for if they are seen as passive sensa-
tions, akin to having a headache.4
Perhaps the feeling theorist could say there is a primitive feeling of fear
that is only fitting if it is caused by something dangerous, and so if the feeling

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is caused by something that is not dangerous, it is unfitting. But the kind of
normativity that applies to emotions goes beyond, say, the norms of proper
vision or digestion. Someone who is color blind does not have a fitting visual
response when they see the red car as green, but this is different from recal-
citrant fear. There are two important differences when it comes to emotions.
First, we have some degree of control over our affective responses. We can
regulate our emotions and employ methods that, in time, can train us out
of, for example, fearing what is not dangerous.5 Second, there is something
that the fear response is getting right in a way that the color response is not.
If we consider someone looking down at the Grand Canyon and considering
walking out onto a glass skywalk which they take the evidence to decisively
show is safe, we can understand their feeling fear because “[i]‌n general, it is
incredibly dangerous to step off a high cliff if it looks like there is nothing
but air between you and the ground . . . [the] fear, then is the output of emo-
tional dispositions which tend to produce accurate representations of danger
in typical contexts” (Milona, ms.).6
Given these considerations, most emotion-​theorists view emotions as rep-
resentations that have fittingness or correctness conditions, and argue that
such representations feel a certain way. If I fear a dog, I represent the dog
as dangerous and it feels a certain way, a way that it is very different from

4 As Grzankowski puts the problem, “One must not understand emotions in such a way as to

land in incoherence or contradiction, but one must also find room for the sense in which cases
of recalcitrance present inconsistency. Theorists about the emotions must find ‘conflict without
contradiction,’ and this looks to be no easy task” (2020, 503–​504).
5 See Tappolet (2016, 37–​ 38) for a discussion of the plasticity of our emotional systems,
which allows us to influence our emotional dispositions.
6 Milona argues that the charge of irrationality is not appropriate in many cases of recalci-

trant emotions. He says of someone’s reactions in Skywalk that they “don’t seem criticizable.”
That we can explain the subject’s fear by appeal to the functioning of a system developed for
adaptive purposes does not tell us that the subject is immune from criticism. Even if a certain
type of male aggression can be explained by mechanisms that were evolutionarily beneficial,
this would not mean that one displaying such aggression (or even having such aggressive feel-
ings that one fails to act on) is immune from criticism. Milona can respond to this worry by ar-
guing that the male aggression is not well functioning. Even if this disposition toward anger has
evolutionary roots, it doesn’t seem to be the output of dispositions such as to typically produce
accurate representations of value. On his view, “well functioning” goes beyond “adaptive” and is
an irreducibly evaluative term. I find it difficult to make sense of the system “well functioning”
in the Skywalk case, but not the aggression case. In both cases, one has reasons to attenuate one’s
emotions.
18 BELIEF AS EMOTION

if I represented the dog as cuddly, or if I represented the dog as dangerous

when he was behind a secure fence and I did not experience fear. In the case
of a recalcitrant emotion, one is feeling the world to be a certain way while
failing to endorse the feeling as warranted. Given how strongly associated

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feelings of fear are with actual danger (and for good evolutionary reasons),
evidence of safety may not be enough to eradicate it.
Despite the broad agreement concerning what emotions are not, there are
competing views about how best to capture the nature of the blend which
does not fit neatly into one of the traditional divisions of the mental land-
scape. As Bennet Helm puts it: “the assumption of the cognitive-​conative
divide” has stood in the way of a proper understanding of the nature or emo-
tions. Emotions “share features of both cognition and conation in a way that
requires rejecting those categories and replacing them with a new one: felt
evaluations” (2001, 23). The idea that this division can be resisted has been
widely discussed in the context of how best to understand moral judg-
ments; are they non-​cognitive responses or beliefs (that are assumed to be
cognitive)?
This issue has been addressed in many ways, but I want to draw attention
to the response that recognizes that these judgments have a non-​cognitive
element at the same time as they purport to capture the truth. Michael Ridge
(2014) has called these approaches “ecumenical” because they find some way
of unifying the cognitivists and the non-​cognitivists. As his discussion shows,
there are many different ways of doing this, all of which come with some ad-
vantages and disadvantages. I am not here concerned with the details; rather,
this shows that the notion of such a “hybrid state” is not entirely unfamiliar.
The kind of hybridity endorsed by Ridge, however, is different from how I am
suggesting we think about beliefs. Ridge thinks of these normative beliefs as
a compound of two distinct states that are, in principle, separable, which is
not the case in a blended state. Once ingredients are blended in a batter, you
cannot remove the sugar. It could be, then, that the kind of hybridity sug-
gested by theorists who posit what have come to be called “besires”—​namely,
states that incorporate both representational and motivational elements
(but are not divisible into representational and motivational conjuncts)—​is
closer to what I have in mind.
While I do see such accounts as helpful to my view, insofar as they are
endorsing the idea that one state can have more than one direction of fit,
and they allow for “cognitive-​passionate hybrid states” (Swartzer 2013), what
I am urging is that we do not need to posit a new mental state; rather, we
need to see that beliefs, like other emotions, themselves incorporate these
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 19

elements. I do not need to endorse one of many particular theories of emo-

tion on offer. Any theory of emotion that allows for the representational and
feeling aspects to be incorporated into one state will allow beliefs to be emo-
tions, and for all the problematic states discussed in Chapter 1 to be beliefs.

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This will include some perceptual or quasi-​perceptual theories, as well as
some “quasi-​” or “neo-​”judgmentalist theories.7
To elucidate the idea of belief as an emotion, I will consider how beliefs
can satisfy the five criteria that are widely accepted as essential components
that “constrain any reasonable definition of what is generally meant by an
emotion” (Deonna & Scherer 2010, 51).8 These are that (i) they are inten-
tional states, namely they “take objects beyond themselves, are about some-
thing or directed at something”; (ii) they have a strong link to motivation and
action; (iii) all instances have the same formal object; (iv) they are felt, and
instances of the same emotion have a shared phenomenology; and (v) they
capture one’s attention. I will consider each in turn.
Even if these are necessary conditions for emotion, one may worry that
they are not sufficient and so that, even if one is convinced that beliefs can
satisfy these conditions, this will not thereby show that beliefs are emotions.
It may be the case that other attitudes, such as desires or intentions, can
satisfy these criteria; are we then to conclude that they are also emotions?
I cover a lot of ground in this book, but I do not discuss the nature of desire or
intention. It does not seem far-​fetched to think of desire as a kind of emotion,
especially if one thinks that desire is a kind of representation of goodness that
feels a certain way. In Chapter 1, I mentioned the views of some early modern
philosophers who viewed our experience of the world as fundamentally af-
fective. This is the picture I am aiming to develop, one that recognizes that
our feelings are inseparable from the rest of our mental structure.9

7 I am quite confident that Deonna and Teroni’s “attitudinal” theory can accommodate the

idea that beliefs are emotions, given that they are feelings directed toward states of affairs. They
take emotions to be “intimately connected with types of action readiness, or more, precisely, felt
action readiness” (2012, 79). That these feelings of action readiness consist in attitudes that are
felt in the body might seem problematic for my view, but many of the calmer emotions are less
obviously felt in the body, but are still allowed, on their view, to be felt. I will return to a consid-
eration of how their view, as well as some other prominent theories, would describe the emotion
I am calling “belief ” at the end of this chapter.
8 See also Teroni (2007) and Cova & Deonna (2014).
9 At a workshop on an early draft of this book, Aude Bandini suggested I was offering an

“emotion-​first” approach to mental states. The various “x-​first” projects differ in various ways
but they all take the “x” as being fundamentally explanatory (and often primitive), endorsing a
view that is more ambitious than the one I have here. Cognitive phenomenologists would agree
that feelings cannot be separated from any mental states, but this does not mean they can be re-
duced to them or that all other states can be explained in terms of feelings.
20 BELIEF AS EMOTION

2.1.1 Intentionality

Of the five criteria, I take this to be the least troubling. No one denies that be-
liefs are about something. Indeed, it is a dominant view among theorists of

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belief that the way to answer the question whether you believe something is
not to look inward at the contents of your mind but outward, and to ask your-
self the question “is it true?” Emotion-​theorists often argue that emotions are
like beliefs in their being representational, so we see that beliefs are taken to
be unproblematically so. One of the main critiques of “feeling-​theories” is
that they have a hard time making sense of emotions being about something
in the world; rather, they are about our bodily feelings. On more sophisti-
cated developments of such theories, or ones that incorporate bodily feelings
as essential to emotions, it is taken that emotions are about objects in the
world, but that one cannot experience an emotion without experiencing the
body ready to act. A common critique of such views is that they fail to prop-
erly characterize the nature of the content of the emotion. How do we differ-
entiate my fear of the dog and your anger at the dog? As Christine Tappolet
puts it: “there is arguably more to the content involved in emotion than their
intentional objects. . . . My fear involves the representation of the dog as dan-
gerous, while your anger involves the representation of the dog as offensive
or obstructive” (2023, 88–​89). Theories that want to avoid the idea that emo-
tions have representational content will have a hard time distinguishing be-
tween types of emotion.

2.1.2 Motivation

Experiencing an emotion will often trigger action. If I am afraid, I will likely

be motivated to act in such a way as to reduce or eliminate the danger. Of
course, there is a wide range of possible actions that I can take when motiv-
ated by fear, but the point is that fear is often a powerful motive for action.
Some theorists have been so impressed with the connection between emo-
tion and motivation that they have identified emotions as motives to action.
The “simple motivation theory” states that emotions are “action tenden-
cies” associated with certain goals; they “aim at establishing, maintaining or
disrupting a relationship with the environment” (Tappolet 2023, 78).
Such theories have been critiqued in a number of ways. They seem to have
a hard time delineating between emotions, given that they often share the
same goal: for example, fear, disgust, and anger are all taken to share the goal
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 21

of protection. Also, it is not clear that all emotions need to have any tie to
motivation at all. Most emotion-​theorists agree that admiration is an emo-
tion, but does admiring a landscape require that one act at all? More complex
motivation theories try to address this worry by expanding the idea of what

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might count as acting in such a case; maybe when admiring a landscape I am
motivated to explore it; as Deonna and Teroni put it, admiration consists in
“feeling the way one’s body opens up to sustained and expanded exploration”
(2012, 81).
Another response is to deny that emotions necessarily motivate, and in-
stead recognize that they have a strong tendency to motivate in certain con-
texts (Tappolet 2016). Once motivation is not seen as necessarily internal to
the emotion, we can see how beliefs can satisfy the criterion as well. Beliefs,
when coupled with other background conditions, motivate us to act. Indeed,
we saw that one of the central characteristics of beliefs, according to the
standard view, is their connection to action, and that it is when certain states
(e.g., delusions and religious attitudes) are viewed as action-​discordant that
their doxastic status is questioned. But like other emotions, beliefs need not
always motivate; it depends on many contextual factors.

2.1.3 Formal Object

Many (though not all) theorists claim that emotions are distinguished from
one another by what is often called their formal object. The formal object
of fear is danger, though the specific object feared can range from a dog to
escalation of the war in the Middle East. The formal object of anger is some-
thing like offense, but the specific object that angers me can range from my
spouse to the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion. The formal object of be-
lief is accuracy, though the specific object of what is believed can range from
a complex historical argument to simple perception. Why have I identified
the formal object of accuracy and not truth? There is clearly something right
about appealing to truth when identifying the “correctness conditions” of be-
lief; if what you believe can be stated as a proposition, and that proposition
is false, then your belief is faulty. As Bernard Williams puts it, “Truth and
falsehood are a ‘dimension of assessment of beliefs as opposed to many other
psychological states of dispositions’ ” (1973, 136).
An important difference between truth and accuracy is that the latter ad-
mits of degrees. Just as something can be represented as more or less dan-
gerous, and the associated feelings will be more or less strong depending on
22 BELIEF AS EMOTION

the degree of danger, so something can be represented as more or less ac-

curate, and the associated strength of belief will vary accordingly. Yet, one
might take it as a datum that all emotions have a positive or negative valence,
that they represent their objects as being good or bad. Indeed, in an introduc-

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tory discussion of emotions, this is how Richard Dub distinguishes “affective
states from nonaffective states such as belief ” (2017, 249). He says, “emotions
always evaluate their intentional objects as being positive or negative. This
is not true of nonaffective mental states. Beliefs present propositions as true,
but truth is not an evaluative property” (250).
I have identified the formal object as accuracy and this can be understood
as an evaluative property.10 In thinking about other contexts (outside that
of the doxastic) where accuracy matters, we see that it is an evaluative prop-
erty. If the anesthesiologist does not provide the accurate amount of the drug
needed to put you under, the results can be fatal. There is positive value to
being accurate, though in many contexts this will not be noticed. This is the
case with other evaluative properties as well. Fear is taken to be a negative
emotion; danger has negative value. But of course, there can be dangerous
items, or animals, or people, in our midst that we don’t notice, and that do
not affect us.
To believe—​that is, to feel something accurate—​has positive valence. In
defending the idea that belief is a “pro-​attitude of sorts”—​that is, a “form of
favoring”—​Wlodek Rabinowicz points to the way we talk about beliefs: “The
language we use when we talk about doxastic attitudes is strongly suggestive
in this regard. We accept some views and reject others. We embrace what we
take to be true and spurn what we take to be false” (2020, 76). Indeed, some
psychological research suggests that there is a positive affect associated with
the feeling of rightness which can lead to people failing to engage analytically
and making poor decisions.11 This is not to say believing always feels good;
the content of what one believes can be devasting. But one must always dis-
tinguish between the content of the emotion and its general valence. Anger
is taken to be a “negative” emotion, but depending on its content, it can feel
really good.

10 Wlodek Rabinowicz has recently argued that we should view probability as a value—​

namely, as an evaluative property: “it does seem that probability may well be viewed as a value. It
might be noted, by the way, that in the classical Latin probabilis was often used to mean ‘worthy
of approval, pleasing, agreeable, acceptable, commendable, laudable, good, fit.’ That ‘probabilis’
was a term of evaluation must have been evident to the Romans” (2020, 77).
11 Thompson & Morsanyi (2012).
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 23

One may object that the bearer of the evaluative property of accuracy dif-
fers in a significant way from the bearer of the evaluative properties of other
emotions. In the previous paragraph, I said that to believe is to feel some-
thing accurate, but what is this “something”? When I represent the dog as

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dangerous, the bearer of the evaluative property is the dog. In the case of be-
lief, it seems it is my representation of a state of affairs that is the bearer of the
evaluative property. Does this require that I represent a representation? If it
does, the worry about infants and animals returns as it seems that a sophisti-
cated kind of metacognition is needed in order to believe.
To address this concern, we can turn to how theorists have understood a
class of emotions that are connected to our own cognitive abilities or defi-
ciencies. These are sometimes called “epistemic” or “intellectual” emotions.
It is quite natural to talk of feeling certain or uncertain, doubtful or confused,
as well as feeling interested or curious. What are the formal objects of these
emotions, and what is the object which bears their evaluative properties?
The same worry about over-​intellectualizing or sophistication arises in these
cases as it does with belief. In thinking how to best characterize the feeling of
confusion, Vazard and Audrin consider whether epistemic or noetic feelings
which “carry information (uncertainty, rightness, etc.) about the properties
of our cognitive operations” need to be based on a type of metacognition that
“requires metarepresentational capacities and, arguably, the possession of
psychological concepts—​such as perception, belief, intention, knowledge—​
which the subject ascribes in order to interpret behavior” (2021, 763). If this
were the case, it would likely exclude children and animals from possessing
these feelings. However, drawing on the work of Jérôme Dokic, they argue
that there is a different kind of metacognition that does not require this cap-
acity for metarepresentation. Instead, they suggest that what is being felt is a
kind of competence akin to physical competence: “According to this compe-
tence view of noetic feelings, the content of noetic feelings can accordingly
be formulated in terms of: ‘I can/​I cannot do this cognitive task.’ So con-
ceived, the noetic feeling of confusion does not require the deployment of
metarepresentational abilities” (764). The feeling of knowing tells you that
your performance will be successful and feeling confused tells you that there
is an obstacle to your success: “confusion is a feeling about one’s cognitive
competence. . . . It is a signal which arises as a result of facing a cognitive obs-
tacle, and which functions to inform us that our cognitive competence has
been challenged, and that our chances of success at the task are comprom-
ised” (764). On this view, the feeling of belief tells you that you have reached
a certain level of competence, one sufficient for a level of commitment, where
24 BELIEF AS EMOTION

you can accept the content for practical purposes, and can rely on it being the
case while being prepared for or open to revision.

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2.1.4 Belief ’s Felt Phenomenology

When I have an occurrent belief, I represent what I believe as accurate, and

this feels a certain way. Just as the feeling differs when one actually fears the
dog from when one represents it as dangerous without feeling fear, so the
feeling differs when I believe the news article I read from how it would feel
if I did not believe it. If I merely accepted it as accurate for the sake of argu-
ment, this would feel different.
Yet to view beliefs as emotions may seem immediately implausible be-
cause it is unclear what the feeling is that accompanies them, whereas we can
easily recognize the feeling of other emotions, though they may be difficult
to articulate. I know what anger feels like, and what fear feels like, but what
does belief feel like? Ronald de Sousa (2008) describes the “feeling of right-
ness” we have when propositions strike us as obviously true, like those which
stem from the deliveries of the senses or recent vivid memories. De Sousa
speculates that part of what might be going wrong for people suffering from
obsessive–​compulsive disorder is that recent memory of performing certain
actions “fails to trigger the right sort of feeling” (197–​98).
The sort of feeling that De Sousa is pointing to here doesn’t quite capture
the kind of feeling that I am suggesting is present in beliefs. We can believe
something without feeling certain, so having some doubts is compatible with
believing.12 Yet, if we are feeling doubtful, this is incompatible with believing
because believing requires commitment. If you believe something, you put
yourself in a position where it is appropriate to ask you to defend your belief
and offer reasons for it: that is, if you are a creature with such capacities. So
why does it seem there is not a word to describe the appropriate level of con-
fidence one has in believing? Here I turn again to Hume:

belief consists not in the peculiar nature or order of ideas, but in the
manner of their conception and in their feeling in the mind. I confess that

12 See Andrew Moon (2018) for an extensive defense of the view that belief and doubt are

compatible. Hawthorne et al. (2016) and Rothschild (2019) argue that much linguistic data sup-
ports the view that the way we ordinarily use the word “belief ” supports the idea that believing
something only requires thinking it likely.
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 25

it is impossible to perfectly to explain this feeling or manner of conception.

We may make use of words which express something near. But its true and
proper name . . . is belief, which is a term that everyone sufficiently under-
stands in common life. (Enquiry 5.12, SBN 50, 1999)

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Indeed, in “common life,” we sometimes find people using “I feel” and “I be-
lieve” interchangeably. I used to (jokingly) tell my students, when they used
the expression “I feel” to convey what they believed, that I didn’t care about
their feelings. But I think this conflation points to something important. It is
not simply metaphoric, in the way that saying I “see” the answer to a problem,
or I “see” what someone means, is. Believing something feels different from
just supposing it for the sake of argument.
Why does it sound all right to say “I feel/​I believe that she’s onto some-
thing,” or “I feel/​I believe things will be OK,” but we would never say “I feel
that grass is green,” or “I feel that the seminar is at midday,” whereas we would
profess to believe those contents? It could be that the feeling associated with
belief is enlivened in certain contexts. Most of the time, with factual proposi-
tions, we will not notice the feeling. But this is the case with many emotions
I have; they do not always have a strong phenomenal feel. Tappolet makes
this point, providing the example of the “quiet contentment while sharing
a meal with a friend” (2016, 6). We may well have emotions all the time of
which we are not aware, and become aware of them when something draws
our attention to them or when they are needed to react appropriately to the
environment. I may not be aware that I am angry at my father until some
event happens that makes me aware. While paradigm emotions can be ana-
lyzed experientially, we can also have long-​standing emotions (including be-
liefs) that are dispositions to have those experiences.
One may think that whatever feeling arises when believing is not internal
to the belief itself, but in reflecting on the belief. If believing is a state, and
one that I am in even when I am asleep, how can there be a feeling associated
with it? But can I be sad when I am asleep? It is very common among belief
theorists to distinguish between occurrent and dispositional beliefs, and the
same distinction can be made concerning other emotions. One can distin-
guish, for example, between being angry about a state of affairs, where this
is thought about more as a disposition, including being disposed to act or
feel in certain ways, and an actual episode of anger. I think it makes as much
sense to say that I am sad that my best friend died in 2018, and that I believe
that Ottawa is the capital of Canada when I am sleeping (both sound a bit
strange but can be made sense of ), and that this is contrasted with cases
26 BELIEF AS EMOTION

where I am aware of the sadness or belief. How the awareness is raised will
likely vary in these cases. A picture of my friend or a text from her son may
bring sadness to my attention, while someone asking me what the capital of
Canada is or hearing someone mistakenly say it is Toronto may bring the

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belief to my attention.
As noted, in trying to explain the nature of belief, Hume calls it a “manner
of conception” and he tells us “an idea assented to feels different from a fic-
titious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us: And this different feeling
I endeavour to explain by calling it a superior force, or vivacity, or solidity,
or firmness, or steadiness” (Treatise 1.3.7.7, 2000) One finds a similar idea
in contemporary defenses of irreducible cognitive phenomenology. Uriah
Kriegel argues that we should construe the “mental commitment of truth” as
an “attitudinal feature, rather than a content feature” of belief (2015, 43). The
content of what is believed is not “p is true;” rather, when one believes, the
content is presented as true and this feels a certain way. To elucidate the “phe-
nomenal attitudinal property of presenting-​as-​true,” which he claims one
finds in all conscious cognitive mental states, he turns to Johnathan Cohen’s
characterization of “credal feelings.” For Cohen, when I believe p I “feel it
true that p” (1992, 11). While Kriegel’s purpose in referencing Cohen is only
to buttress the idea that presenting as true “admits of phenomenal under-
standing,” their views diverge significantly. One of Cohen’s main tenets is that
what distinguishes belief from acceptance is that, when one believes some-
thing, one “feels” it true in a way that one does not if one only accepts it. Yet
for Kriegel, all cognitive states share the same phenomenal attitudinal prop-
erty and one way he distinguishes between them is by their “varying degrees
of confidence.”
Here we begin to see that, while some defenders of irreducible cognitive
phenomenology share my view that beliefs feel a certain way, their view dif-
fers from mine in that they begin with the assumption that “belief ” falls into
the cognitive category, to be contrasted with the affective or conative. I am
arguing that we reject this assumption. Indeed, Kriegel elucidates the phe-
nomenology of “making a judgment” by articulating a number of “phenom-
enological platitudes.” They include “Making a judgment that p involves a
credal feeling, that is, a feeling of committing to the truth of p” and “Making
the judgment that p is typically accompanied by a feeling of confidence about
that judgment” (2015, 67). The notions of confidence and commitment in-
vite the idea that such a mental action, and the state of believing that accom-
panies it, should not be understood as purely intellectual: namely, void of any
affective or conative elements.
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 27

Feeling something to be true or accurate sounds like the way the phe-
nomenology of seemings is described. In a recent discussion of the nature of
seemings, McCain and Moretti say this:

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[S]‌eemings have a distinctive phenomenology. They have what Huemer
(2001: 77–​9) calls “forcefulness” . . . Seemings present their propositional
contents as true. As Tolhurst (1998: 298–​9) explains, “seemings have the
feel of truth, the feel of a state whose content reveals how things really are.”
Pryor (2000: 547) expresses the idea like this: “Our [seemings] represent
propositions in such a way that it ‘feels as if ’ we could tell that those proposi-
tions are true—​and that we’re perceiving them to be true—​just by virtue of
having them so represented.” It is this phenomenal force (in Pryor’s termin-
ology) that makes a seeming different from an imagining. When S imagines
that p, she is in a mental state that has propositional content but lacks phe-
nomenal force—​p does not strike S as being true. (2022, 61)

Yet, most theorists think it is important to distinguish seemings from be-

liefs for several reasons. First, seeming and believing can come apart in a
number of ways. Even when you know that the oar is straight, though it looks
bent, or the two lines are the same length in the Müller–​Lyer illusion, it still
seems like the oar is bent or that that one line is longer than the other. How
is this seeming different from the feeling that accompanies belief ? Or per-
haps you harbor a dispositional or unconscious belief that has no seeming
attached to it. Further, many contend that seemings offer (defeasible) jus-
tification for beliefs but do not want to be attached to the idea that having a
belief offers such support.
The view of belief as an emotion, where emotions are understood as
blended states, allows us to distinguish them from seemings while also recog-
nizing that they are often practically indistinguishable. I look out my window
and I see a tree; it seems there is a tree there and I believe there is a tree there.
In such a simple case, these states are phenomenologically alike; among the
ingredients in the blended belief-​state are feelings that are much like those
of these seemings. But their capacity to diverge demonstrates belief ’s com-
plexity, and such complexity extends to its phenomenology as well. When
I become aware of the Müller–​Lyer illusion, when I have drawn and meas-
ured the lines myself, the representation of the lines as unequal no longer
feels accurate, as it would if I believed them to be unequal. The feelings in-
herent in belief, as we have seen, have connections to motivation and action
which are not there in seemings.
28 BELIEF AS EMOTION

In what sense, then, do the lines still seem to be different lengths? Well,
they look like different lengths and so there is a perceptual seeming or ap-
pearance that exerts some kind of force. I think this force is enough to consti-
tute an inclination to believe, given how often one’s sense perceptions reveal

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the truth.13 The case is similar to when one finds oneself with feelings associ-
ated with fear, perhaps after waking up from a bad dream. There is no object
that is being represented as dangerous and so the correct answer to the ques-
tion “what are you afraid of ?” would be “nothing.” One can have fear-​like
feelings without being afraid, since actually experiencing fear is more than
just a feeling; it is a feeling about or toward something being represented in
a certain way.

2.1.5 Attention

Those who are impressed with emotions’ role in action have also pointed
out that emotions direct our attention to features of the environment that
are of concern to us. Indeed, some take it that emotions exhibit “control pre-
cedence,” in that when we experience an emotion, it exerts a kind of control
and demand of our attention. This view of emotion is one that can be tied to
the idea that one is “acting emotionally” in a way that shows the emotion to
be dominating, and diminishing of cooler reactions and actions. It seems ob-
vious that we can have many low-​level perceptual or background beliefs that
do not command our attention.
It is important to note that this condition poses a problem for “weak”
background emotions, “mild emotions such as light fear,” as well as for ones
of which one is not conscious, and so is controversial among philosophers
of emotion. As Tappolet puts it, “the problem is that there are cases of mild
emotional episodes, which have low control precedence but which nonethe-
less count as emotion” (2023, 81). And so, if there is not a way for beliefs
to satisfy this condition, it would not thereby mean beliefs cannot count as
emotions, if one would not reject the idea that mild emotions are indeed
emotions.
It may be, however, that there are different ways to think about attention
which would allow both beliefs and other “weak” emotions to contain this
feature. This idea has recently been introduced by Stephane Lemaire (2022),

13 Yet, once aware of the illusion, one might think that there is an intellectual seeming that re-

veals they are the same length.

 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 29

who distinguishes between the object of the emotion being made salient
on the one hand and the object being one on which we focus on the other
Attention as salience, in this context, refers not to the focus of attention on
the object, but to the object functioning as a stimulus or trigger of the emo-

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tion. Lemaire refers to a number of experiments that show how subjects can
process emotional stimuli and react accordingly even when unaware, and
so not focusing on these stimuli. It could well be that we update beliefs in
response to all kinds of stimuli made salient in a similar way, without being
aware of this process.

2.2 Questions and Clarifications

I have now shown how beliefs can satisfy the criteria that many take as ne-
cessary for a state to be categorized as an emotion. These are necessary but
likely not sufficient conditions, so this discussion has only shown that there
is no obvious barrier to belief ’s inclusion based on widely accepted criteria
for what counts as an emotion. The rest of this book will show how this clas-
sification can bear a lot of theoretical fruit. Before turning to how viewing be-
liefs as emotions can help us resist non-​doxasticism in a number of domains,
and can illuminate some puzzling phenomena in the doxastic realm, I will
address some further questions and concerns, and consider how some prom-
inent theories of emotion would each characterize belief.

(i) On my view, are any states purely cognitive? What is

the relationship between belief and knowledge? Is knowledge
an emotion?
I think the concept of a purely cognitive state is coherent, though I am not
sure that humans have any. Whether or not knowledge is an emotion de-
pends on whether one takes it to be a kind of belief (then it is), or if it is a
different kind of state to be thought of as distinct from belief. If we think of
knowledge as a description of a relation between an agent and the world,
such as Jennifer Nagel suggests, then it is not an emotion. In her introductory
book on knowledge, she says: “Knowledge . . . is a link between a person and
a fact” (2014, 4). What many contemporary epistemologists are interested in
is understanding the nature of this link.
When distinguishing a cognitive from conative or affective state, one
might point to one’s head as opposed to one’s heart or body; cognition is
about thinking not feeling. As we have seen, Kriegel and others argue that
30 BELIEF AS EMOTION

thinking has a certain feel, so maybe the dividing line is not as clear. For em-
bodied beings, it may be that pure thought is not a possibility. Still, I think
there are differences between beliefs as I have been describing them, and
other states that are usually included on the cognitive side—​ones that do not

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include the feeling associated with belief, which are not “blended” in the way
beliefs are. As discussed above, these include supposing, or hypothesizing,
and perhaps certain kinds of practical acceptances. Again, Cohen’s introduc-
tion of “credal feelings” was meant as a way to distinguish beliefs from accept-
ances. One important point about these other mental states and activities is
that they are voluntary in a way that beliefs are not. This is not to say that we
exert no kind of control over our beliefs, and indeed over our other emotions
as well, but it is of a more indirect kind.14
The idea that the way to understand knowledge is to begin with belief and
then ask what ingredients must be added to belief such that the conditions of
knowledge are met dominated a lot of late twentieth-​century epistemology,
and has continued to exert substantial influence in this century. But there
are detractors, and I think one of the reasons we have ended up with such an
impoverished understanding of belief (especially in the context of epistem-
ology) is because the “important” questions have centered on the conditions
needing to be added. We find a contrasting picture from those, following
Williamson (2000), who defend a “knowledge first” approach. Perhaps we
should begin with a state that is less ambiguous—​namely, knowledge, a state
that is “factive”—​and then we could understand belief in terms of “botched
knowledge” if it fails to attain this factive state due either to its being false or
to its being accidently true. In a recent discussion, David Hunter puts it like
this: “from the inside, believing is just like knowing. In deliberating, a be-
liever attends to the reasons she takes there to be, and these are the facts as
she sees them” (2022, 16).
This has now become a common way of thinking about belief, especially
among epistemologists. Perhaps there is a state that can be picked out that
behaves the way epistemologists say belief does, that feels like knowledge,
or credence 1, if one likes that way of talking. But, as discussed in thinking
about other epistemic emotions, feeling certain differs from the feeling of be-
lief. The idea that some beliefs are more strongly held than others requires
that we make this distinction.

14 I discuss what kind of control we have over belief in Schleifer McCormick (2011; 2015, ch.

6). For a recent discussion that brings up some problems with my view, see Osbourne (2021).
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 31

(ii) If beliefs are emotions, can the reasons to hold them be universal?
There seem to be logical relations between beliefs that do not hold
between emotions.
An important difference one may see between beliefs and emotions has to

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do with reasons supporting them and the logical relations between them. It
is often taken that a feature of good reasons for belief is that they apply uni-
versally, some even might say categorically. If I have evidence that supports
the truth of a proposition, it seems I have reason to believe it regardless of
my desires, inclinations, or motivations. And if you find yourself in identical
epistemic circumstances, you have the same epistemic reasons that I do, even
if our desires and interests vastly differ. I know that you have a reason to be-
lieve the earth revolves around the sun without knowing any of your specific
aims or goals. While evidence is important for figuring out what reasons one
has for emotions, it seems less troubling to relativize the reasons to a par-
ticular subject and context. I may need to know more about you to figure out
what you have reasons to be fearful, angry, or anxious about. If I find out you
have a deathly peanut allergy, I can see you have a reason to be anxious at the
picnic that I don’t have.
One could respond by saying that if our circumstances are identical, then
we will have the same reasons to be anxious, but this is to ignore the pur-
ported disanalogy, which claims that everyone has reason to believe in ac-
cord with the evidence while not everyone has reason to be anxious when
peanuts are around. Putting the contrast in that way isn’t quite right either.
If we stick to the same level of generality, we can say everyone has a reason
to fear what is dangerous, but what constitutes danger can vary according to
one’s context and subjective makeup. What constitutes evidence supposedly
does not have this variance. Of course, in some ways this is not correct; the
evidence I possess or even have access to varies with my context and my sub-
jective capacities.
Why is it, though, that epistemic reasons seem to have this universality? In
his argument for why epistemic rationality and reasons are not instrumental,
Kelly (2003) recognizes that we talk and act as if reasons that are tied to the
general desire of self-​preservation are categorical. I say, for example, that you
have a reason not to consume a poisonous substance without considering
whether you have the goal of living longer or not. I may have no desire to
take the medicine, but I still have a reason to do so which is connected to my
more general commitment to life. That we can talk about reasons for belief
applying to agents independently of their specific circumstances and goals
may be because of a similar assumption we make about agents in general.
32 BELIEF AS EMOTION

Kelly argues, however, that when it comes to beliefs, we cannot make similar
assumptions: “there is simply no cognitive goal or goals, which is plausible
to attribute to people generally, which is sufficient to account for the relative
phenomena. Individuals do not typically have this goal: believing the truth”

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(2003, 623).
I agree that if one tries to find a specific desire or goal, like the goal of ac-
quiring true beliefs, one will not find that in all agents. But what if the system
of epistemic normativity that provides us with reasons to believe is ultim-
ately dependent on its extreme practical value? In a footnote, Kelly considers
a wider conception of instrumental rationality based on Williams’s (1979)
discussion of internal and external reasons, which counts a reason as instru-
mental if it will “advance not only goals which I actually hold but also goals
which I might reach by a process of sound deliberation from my present ‘sub-
jective motivational set’ ” (Kelly 2003, 633). While it seems clear that I can
have a reason to believe a particular proposition even if I have no desire to
believe (and perhaps even a desire not to believe) that particular proposition,
it may well be that in my subjective motivational set, as well as every other
agent, one can find a commitment to practices that contribute to human
flourishing. I view our system of epistemic norms and reasons as one of those
practices, and so these reasons have an ultimate practical base, though not
narrowly instrumental. This is the case with other emotions as well. I could
not become angry in response to someone offering me a million dollars to
feel angry. But I could have a commitment to only be angry in response to
actual offense, and this commitment can have the same basis as my commit-
ment to only believing on sufficient evidence. Both commitments are defeas-
ible, but given the importance of the norms, not easily so.
However, many theorists would accept the idea that one could have a
value-​related reason to feel angry even when it is not clear that anger is fit-
ting. For example, anger can fuel and strengthen protest movements that
can lead to changes in systematic injustice; a reason for anger can be linked
to this goal. This reason would not disappear even if it turned out that one
specific target of the anger turned out not to be a fitting one. To many, such
an analogous story about beliefs has seemed more problematic. One reason
for denying that practical considerations can be reasons for belief assumes
that there is a link between good reasoning and good argument. I am sug-
gesting these should be de-​linked, particularly if arguments are understood
as needing to be in propositional form, containing premises and conclusions.
That some propositions offer support for others does not tell us anything
about what is going on in the mental movements of the agent. Coming to
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 33

believe, even when such beliefs are inferred from or based on other consid-
erations (which may be other beliefs), can be done in an automatic manner
and to reconstruct what takes place in such mental transitions as something
akin to an explicit argument with premises and conclusions is misleading.

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To ask whether an inference is valid when engaged in a logical proof and
to ask whether someone is justified in coming to believe what she believes
on the basis of the reasons she has are usually two very different kinds of
questions.15
In defending the idea that there is a tight connection between good
reasoning and good arguments, one can point out that reasoning is ex-
pressible, and that it may even be a shared activity.16 Even if we accept that
reasoning is expressible, why think the form of expression must be the stating
of an argument with premises and a conclusion? When I asked my friend
Susan who was facing death from cancer to describe why she believed that
some aspect of her being would continue after she died, the reasons for her
belief were broadly practical, connected to love and comfort rather than evi-
dence and truth. Yet, she did not need to be silent, even though the belief was
not based on evidence. But what she said did not take this form: “Believing
that some aspect of my being will continue after I die is comforting and so
some aspect of my being will continue after I die.” Instead, she expressed dif-
ferent feelings she had when contemplating her impending death and the
various possibilities of what would occur after. These feelings were insepar-
able from the belief that some aspect of her being would continue to exist and
they helped to support and maintain it.17
I have taken some time to address this concern about the ways that beliefs
interact with each other and with reasons because I think it points to the cen-
tral concern with the idea that belief can be an emotion; we think people can
share their beliefs and the reasons that support them in a way that we don’t
expect with other emotions. The ideas that I have brought up in response,
that beliefs can be rationally supported by value-​related reasons and that
the way beliefs interact differs from the way propositions in a logical proof
interact, are ones I will return to throughout the book.

15 Boghossian (2019) clearly distinguishes between inference as reasoning and inferences as

arguments: “I am not here talking about inference as argument: that is as a set of propositions,
with some designated as ‘premises’ and one designated as the ‘conclusion’. I am talking about in-
ference as reasoning, as the psychological transition from one (for example) belief to another”
(2019, 101).
16 Jonathan Way (2016) defends this view.
17 For more detail on the view of how beliefs can be based on non-​e vidential reasons, see

Schleifer McCormick (2015, 2019).

34 BELIEF AS EMOTION

(iii) On my view, can computers or robots have beliefs?

There is something to belief beyond intellectual processing, and it is not only
when beliefs go wrong that there is more to them. To put it another way, ma-
chines can have cognitions of some kind, but they cannot have beliefs.18 To

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support the idea of cognitive-​phenomenal primitivism, Kriegel asks us to
imagine a person, whom he calls Zoe, who lacks any sensory, emotional or
algedonic phenomenology and yet has rich inner intellectual life, one that
has a unique phenomenology. Zoe “happens to be a mathematical genius,
with a penchant for considering and solving mathematical problems. In her
darkened world of sensory, algedonic, and emotional emptiness, she none-
theless formulates mathematical propositions, thinking informally about
their plausibility, and then trying to prove them from axioms she has provi-
sionally set” (Kriegel 2015, 55). This being differs from a computer because
we are supposed to “imagine this person having considerable underlying
information-​processing power, though one that does not translate into phe-
nomenal experience” (55). As briefly discussed above, the kinds of experi-
ence of struggle, or “seeing” the answer (those “aha” moments), are often
described as epistemic emotions. Yet, Kriegel is careful to remind us that “this
life is exhausted entirely by intellectual or cognitive activities: thinking, con-
sidering, judging, realizing, intuiting, remembering, and so on. Importantly,
they do not involve phenomenal experiences of satisfaction or frustra-
tion . . . we must keep in mind that Zoe derives no felt joy from her intellec-
tual activities” (56).
While Kriegel recognizes it can be difficult to imagine such a being, his
point is that such a being is possible, and so shows that pure thoughts have
a phenomenological component. What this discussion shows, I think, is
that such a being can differentiate their thoughts, and one way to charac-
terize that difference is by using terms like “liveliness” and “vivacity,” terms
that both Hume and Kriegel use. So, to distinguish the solution of the proof
from the thoughts that are not the solution, perhaps Zoe registers them as
having a different force, which allows her to transition to another problem.
Now, whatever mental states one might want to attribute to Zoe, I contend
that she does not have beliefs. One important characteristic of beliefs, which
everyone agrees on, is that it is possible for them to be faulty or misguided.
Further, we can have beliefs which we do not express, and we can say that we
believe things which we do not (we can lie).

18 This claim should be somewhat qualified. If artificial intelligence reaches a point where

emotions are attributable to such “machines,” then beliefs will be as well.

 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 35

It is this last feature of belief which led Bernard Williams to claim that ma-
chines cannot have beliefs. He imagines a machine which can gather infor-
mation from its environment, and print out propositions, and has a device
which distinguishes between true propositions and ones that are only hy-

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potheses. Williams argues that machines’ states are not beliefs but “would be
instances of a much impoverished notion which I shall call ‘B-​states’ ” (1973,
145), and this is because the machine cannot be insincere or reticent: that
is, it cannot assert what it does not believe or not assert what it does. Given
that the machine’s outputs are non-​accidently true (and perhaps reliable),
Williams says we could attribute knowledge to the machine. We could say
“that it knows when the aircraft leaves . . . that it knows where certain build-
ings are in the town,” and he goes on to say, “I would claim in fact that this
use of the word ‘know’ about the machine is not far away from a lot of the
uses we make of the word ‘know’ about human beings whereas the use of the
word ‘belief ’ to refer to the B-​states that the machine is in is quite a long way
from the way in which we use the word ‘believe’ ” (146). Indeed, when we
ask Siri19 for some information, it does not sound infelicitous to say that Siri
knows the answer, while attributing beliefs to Siri is much odder.20 Williams
concludes from this that beliefs have some connection to the will, which this
machine (and Zoe) lack. What Williams gets right is that belief is a more
complex mental state than knowledge; as he puts it, “a machine to which we
properly ascribed knowledge can be a lot more primitive than one to which
we properly ascribed beliefs” (146). This complexity is captured by categor-
izing belief as an emotion.

(iv) On my view, can animals and young children have beliefs?

Must one possess the concept of fear or the fearsome in order to feel afraid?
If we are to allow that infants and non-​human animals have emotions, it is
important that this is not the case; the mouse represents the cat as dangerous
when feeling fear, and the baby represents their mother’s voice as soothing
when feeling content, even though neither could articulate the concepts in-
herent in these descriptions.21 Indeed, Christine Tappolet argues that an ad-
vantage of the perceptual theory she endorses is it takes the “representational

19 Siri is the name of Apple’s “assistant” that provides Iphone users with information

when asked.
20 When I asked Chat-​GTP if it has beliefs, the answer was “no,” but it claimed to have a lot of

knowledge when asked.

21 It should be noted that not all theories take content possession to require any kind of so-

phisticated, intellectually articulable, grasp of the content.

36 BELIEF AS EMOTION

content of emotions to be non-​conceptual” (2016, 16) even though “emo-

tions can, and often do, involve conceptually articulated contents” (18).
Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini has recently brought up a similar worry
about theories which attempt to distinguish beliefs from other attitudes

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by appealing to their “feeling of truth”: “Non-​human animals and babies
have beliefs but they arguably lack the ability to assert or have any ‘sense of
truth’ ” (2020, 3271). My view does not require that one has the concept of
“truth” or “rightness” to be a believer. The feeling is one associated with ex-
pectations and dispositions that babies and non-​human animals share with
adult humans. When a baby stops crying upon hearing the footsteps of their
caregiver, they believe that the caregiver is near and so they will soon be com-
forted. In doing so, they are representing the caregiver’s proximity in a cer-
tain way, one tied to expectations, and for this to have the effect of ceasing
crying, it must be seen as offering an accurate assessment of the connection
between footsteps, caregiver, and comfort. The content of beliefs can almost
always be grasped in propositional form by adult humans, but that does not
mean that the feeling that one’s representation of the world is accurate re-
quires that one has a sophisticated concept of truth or accuracy, any more
than the feeling experienced when fearful needs to include the concept of
fearsome or dangerous.22

(v) Having contradictory beliefs displays a stronger kind of irrationality

than contradictory emotions
One may think that a difference between beliefs and emotions is exhibited in
the way we can talk about them. Some think the assertion “I believe p, though
my evidence does not support p” is just like the classic Moore-​paradoxical as-
sertion “It is raining, but I do not believe it is raining”: namely, that both are
incoherent.23 In contrast, as we have seen, it does not seem incoherent to say
“I fear p though my evidence does not support p being dangerous.” I have dis-
cussed at length elsewhere the possibility of believing, in full consciousness,
something you do not have evidential support for.24 Even if such an asser-
tion is not incoherent, though, as in the case of other recalcitrant emotions, it

22 There has been substantial push back to the idea that mental representations are best

understood as representing propositions. See De Brigard (2015) for discussion.

23 See Jonathan Adler (2002)’s discussion, especially pp. 26–​32.
24 See Schleifer McCormick (2005, 2015). Huddleston (2012) makes an even stronger

claim: namely, that one can believe something one knows is false. This does not seem possible.
If you believe something that can be stated in the form of the proposition, then you take it to be
true. You can recognize that it is possible it is false, but you cannot know that it is false.
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 37

displays a kind of normative defect. Beliefs, like fears, if central and powerful,
can persist even when one’s reflective evaluations indicate one should not
believe as one does. Consider someone who has grown up in a fundamen-
talist tradition and believes that the Bible is literally true. This person may

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come to conclude that this belief is unsupported, and that he should give it
up. Now we can imagine that it would be very difficult to break the habit of
believing something inculcated at a very early age and reinforced throughout
one’s life—​just as it is very difficult to give up smoking after twenty years even
when one decides one should.

(vi) Why must beliefs be emotions instead of just connected to them?

One may think that the kinds of cases I have appealed to point to beliefs
being closely associated with emotions, and even caused by them, but that
the feelings are independent of the belief, and that we have no reason to think
that there is an actual feeling component that is part of the belief. The widely
discussed phenomenon of “motivated belief ” or “motivationally biased be-
lief ” points out how emotions can lead one to believe in certain ways: for
example, by leading one to attend to certain evidence and not others.25 This
is one prevalent way of understanding self-​deception, which we will discuss
further in Chapter 6. On such a view belief can be infected by emotions in
certain ways that will lead away from rationality.
What I want to argue is that this way of thinking is misguided in viewing
emotions as infecting beliefs so that they become defective. If belief is an
emotion, then it can interact and mix with other emotions just as other emo-
tions can in ways that can illuminate and explain. The feeling of relief may
lead and explain my feeling of elation. My joy may be mitigated or dimin-
ished by some disappointment. In Chapter 6, I will argue that thinking about
the way emotions mix (and, indeed, mixed emotions) can help address puz-
zles of self-​deception and implicit-​attitudes.

2.3 Different Ways of Characterizing the Belief Emotion

Before turning to the ways in which thinking of belief as an emotion

can help illuminate what is going on in cases of evidence-​resistant or
action-​discordant beliefs, as well as offering a way to make sense of deep

25 See, e.g., Mele (2001).

38 BELIEF AS EMOTION

disagreement, I will close by considering how various competing theories

of emotion would characterize belief. As mentioned above, I do not think all
the competing views about the nature of emotion could accommodate belief.
Whether this is a strike against, or a point in favor of, those theories, I will

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leave to the reader to decide.
First, consider Michael Brady’s neo-​judgmentalist view (Brady 2009).
For Brady, emotions include inclinations to assent to evaluative construals,
as well as emotional feelings which involve increased attention and sensi-
tivity to the emotional object. Let’s take fear as an example: when I experi-
ence fear, the import of the situation is impressed upon me; I construe it as
dangerous, and when I have such an experience I am “inclined to assent or
endorse this view of the situation” (Brady 2009, 421). When I am afraid, both
motivational and cognitive resources are mobilized which incline me both to
behave in a certain way and to assent or accept that things are a certain way.
Brady’s model can quite easily accommodate the view of belief I have put for-
ward. When I believe, it is impressed upon me that the world is a certain way,
and this feeling puts a great deal of pressure on me to assent to the accuracy
of this representation. Just as feeling fear includes a strong inclination to ac-
cept the view that p is dangerous, believing includes a strong inclination to
accept the view that p is accurate.
According to Christine Tappolet’s (2016) perceptual theory, emotions
are “perceptual experiences of evaluative properties.” It is important for her
view that they are not mere perceptions because emotions can misfire: “In
contrast with perceptions, perceptual experiences are not factive, for you
can have the perceptual experience of the grey cat as black but perceiving
that the cat is gray entails that it is gray” (Tappolet 2016, 15. Further, she en-
dorses a liberal view of perceptual experiences that includes much beyond
sensory experience. According to this view, “perception can be defined as
“a kind awareness to things and qualities” and “the features that are most
important on such a liberal account are among those that emotions share
with sensory experience: phenomenal properties, automaticity, world-​
guidedness, correctness conditions, and informational encapsulation” (29–​
30). In a footnote, she adds that the etymology of perception supports this
broader use of the term: “. . . ‘to perceive’ comes from the Latin percipere,
which means to gather, or metaphorically, to grasp with the mind, to take
entirely” (000).
Tappolet notes that for those uncomfortable with this liberal account
or perception, it might be easier to accept the claim that emotions are
 BELIEF AS A BLENDED STATE 39

quasi-​perceptions, and she views this as more of “terminological than a sub-

stantive issue” (000). Given that Tappolet accepts that there are some im-
portant differences between sensory perceptions and emotions, there is
no barrier to including belief as an emotion on her view. Fear is perceiving

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something as fearsome, or dangerous; shame is perceiving something as
shameful. Belief is perceiving something as accurate. As discussed above, the
nature of the “something” in the case of belief requires some explanation, but
this is the case with other complex emotions as well.
Finally, let’s consider how the Deonna and Teroni’s attitudinal theory
would characterize belief. On their view, “an emotion is an attitude towards
an object, an attitude which it is appropriate to have when the latter exempli-
fies a given evaluative property,” and different emotions are best understood
as “distinctive evaluative attitudes as opposed to attitudes directed towards
evaluative contents” (2012, 76). They argue that this is an improvement
over the perceptual model because the objects of emotions are the objects
that are taken to have certain qualities, rather than the evaluative properties
themselves. They claim that their view “accords with our ordinary way of
talking about the emotions and thus avoids the revisionary implications of
the perceptual model, according to which evaluative properties end up being
what the emotions are about” (78). So, your fear is about the dog, not about
danger. Further emotions are “felt bodily-​attitudes” and part of what is felt is
a kind of “action readiness.” For example, “[f ]‌ear is an evaluative attitude, an
attitude in the light of which the subject will typically form specific desires
such as the desire to scamper up the nearest tree. Anger is an attitude in the
light of which the subject will form the desire to avenge himself in this or that
way” (83).
As discussed above, both what is felt in the body, and what counts as
“action-​readiness,” is more attenuated when it comes to calmer emotions like
admiration. Further, they suggest that some emotions may be “felt, yet non-​
embodied, attitudes” (81). Belief, then, on this account can be described as
an attitude in light of which the subject typically forms a commitment to act
on or defend a view. The “typically” in these descriptions allows that this
is not always the case, which is helpful for explaining evidence-​resistant or
action-​discordant beliefs.
Tappolet has criticized this view in a number of ways, an important one
being that “the proposed picture of emotional motivation lacks plausibility”
(2023, 91). Deonna and Teroni’s descriptions tend to involve behavioral dis-
positions, but “in the case of human beings, an account in terms of behavioral
40 BELIEF AS EMOTION

dispositions will not do. We sometimes run away or attack out of fear, but
what we do when we experience fear is of course much more varied” (91).
Rather, she argues emotions give us reasons for action but often such action
will result from an agent deliberating and deciding what to do, if anything.

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The attitudinal theorist may have resources to address this worry, and the
perceptual theorist may have the resources to allay Deonna and Teroni’s criti-
cisms. My purpose here is not to adjudicate between them, but rather to show
that on three different prominent theories, belief can count as an emotion.
Again, what these theories share, despite their differences, is that emotions
are feelings that provide us with information about the world which can
make a difference in how we think, feel, and act.

2.4 Summary

Believing, like other emotions, requires feeling the world to be a certain

way, and this feeling connects importantly to motivation and action. I have
labeled the feeling, the “feeling of accuracy,” which is closely connected to
what others have called the “feeling of rightness,” but differs because it is im-
portant that one can have a level of confidence or commitment sufficient for
belief even while harboring some doubts. Also, beliefs can vary in strength,
as can other emotions. While I have argued that there is nothing preventing
beliefs from being understood as emotions, what is most important going
forward is that they are felt evaluative representations. The rest of this book
argues that thinking of beliefs this way is theoretically fruitful.