Imperfect Cognitions

This post is authored by Juliette Vazard, a PhD candidate at the  Center for Affective Sciences  at the University of Geneva, and at the  Institut Jean Nicod  at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.  In this post she discusses her paper “ Epistemic Anxiety, Adaptive Cognition, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder ” recently published in Discipline Filosofiche. I am curious about what certain types of dysfunctional epistemic reasoning present in affective disorders might reveal about the role that emotions play in guiding our epistemic activities. Recently, my interest was drawn to the emotion of anxiety. Anxiety has often been understood as belonging to the domain of psychopathology, and the role of this emotion in the everyday lives of healthy individuals has long remained understudied. In this article I argue that anxiety plays an important role in guiding our everyday epistemic activities, and that when it is ill-calibrated, this is likely to result in ...