On Knowing What One Really Wants: Emotions, Valuing, and Substantial Self-Knowledge

Abstract

The contribution of emotions to our knowledge of ourselves remains undertheorized in the philosophical literature on self-knowledge, even among authors who focus on ‘substantial’ self-knowledge. This is a shortcoming because emotions are crucial to obtain the sort of self-knowledge that can play a transformative role in our lives (or engaged self-knowledge). To show this, here I rework Krista Lawlor’s (2009) example of Katherine, a woman who is wondering whether she wants a second child. Lawlor offers and empiricist account of substantial self-knowledge, where purely epistemic self-knowledge, gained through introspection and inference, is enough to satisfy Katherine and “stick” (i.e., halt her investigation). While Lawlor conceives sticking as a mere absence of the motivation to investigate further, in my analysis sticking is an affective phenomenon that involves the epistemic emotion of certainty based on emotional insight, i.e. the right evaluative responses to what one knows. But achieving emotional insight in cases of opaque substantial self-knowledge is not easy. Here, I go beyond Lawlor by proposing that investigating what we value through an imaginative exploration of our emotions and other evaluative attitudes is a particularly promising route.