Gain Knowledge through Reasoning

Reason and emotion are not always associated together; however the two are deeply intertwined at their bases. Emotion, defined as an inherent response to different situations which results in several variations of internal and external behaviors, is in fact always influencing our reasoning, which is defined as the application of logic in decisions and actions of everyday life and is gained through experience. The main knowledge issue present in this complex tangle of emotion and reasoning is, “How do we know if our emotion is enhancing or limiting our ability to gain knowledge through reasoning? ”

Although there are some instances in which our emotion may help our reasoning, the majority of circumstances in which knowledge can be gained through reasoning is tainted by the presence of emotion.

Emotion can be used in many ways to enhance logic as a way of knowing. By having these two together, one can have a possibility of using emotion as a gut feeling, as intuition to use one’s natural knowledge of himself/herself and of his/her beliefs to perceive different situations and things to gain knowledge.

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Such a tool is most important in situations involving personal gain, where choosing to help someone or hurt someone is done by emotion; in these cases I would be emotionally influenced by this “gut feeling” to help them instead of hurt them. In contrast, a solely logical perspective would only place you in view and only think the benefits you would get, or the society would get.

Emotion allows people to think of specific viewpoints quicker and for other people and beings as well.

Logic might allow us in a grand scheme of things to view everything but the fact is that we may not understand such things in shorter periods of time; we need emotion and intuition for such knowledge to be found by us. Although a prominent natural process may be to hybridize emotion with reasoning in order to enhance our own knowledge, the fact is that emotion can also be known to interfere with a huge number of situations which would cause us to fail or be hindered in the attempt to gain knowledge.

If I was to attempt to study biology with a nasty temper, this would hinder my attempt to gain this  nowledge, as my anger would cause me to misread a few of the concepts and thereby hinder my gaining of knowledge by learning incorrect or confused terminology, instead of the correct ones. This is not only occurs in terms of “learning” knowledge but also in understanding your environment and situation.

Being in a situation that is new to someone is possibly the best way to test this concept. Because of the new situation, reasoning is a person’s best chance at gaining true knowledge. I once was stuck in a dark room where I had never been before; my fear would have overcome me and I’d have perceived perhaps a boogie monster or my death rapidly approaching. However using my reasoning and my senses I was able to conclude that there would be none of those possibilities and that I can find a way out.

Emotion is unable to cope with reason in such a case and would only disables us from accurately perceiving our surroundings in an accurate way. The final, possibly most lethal, way that emotion undermines our reason as a way of knowing is how it cannot be justified and you may not use it as justification for knowledge as per definition of it.

Emotion is a gut feeling that is not based on experience as our definition states, since it is inherent and is with you from beginning to end. Hence it only justifies your own perception, but not whether it is true or untrue, as the majority of people would perceive differently no matter the similarity of their emotions to your own. Two angry men might see something in such an extraordinary a manner they might see the faultiness of their counterpart, but not their own. Blinded by emotion they would see a loved one either as their only hope to stay human or as their one true conspiring enemy.

However, this does not imply the failure of emotion as a whole to enable emotion to fuse with reason to help and ease our digestion of knowledge and of learning and perceiving new things in new situations. As in our examples, we have shown that emotions can be the key to unlocking the piece of knowledge that would grant us the conceptual knowledge of this piece in a quick and small time frame. Although there are many situations that emotions can get in the way of reason as a way of knowing, emotion can also help.

However we also know that logic and reasoning are most often interconnected with one another, as emotion alone would blind us to how we gain true knowledge (and apply) and our perception, by itself, would be more flawed than ever . Reason would therefore be, more often than not, vulnerable to emotion as a way of knowing. Show preview only The above preview is unformatted text This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge section.