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Feeling is Believing? Exploring Belief as Emotion with Professor Miriam Schleifer McCormick
We typically think of beliefs as cognitive representations of the world that should be responsive to evidence and truth. In contrast, emotions are very different sorts of mental states: they seem to be non-cognitive, perhaps non-representational, and they have a certain feeling to
them. Or so the traditional story goes. But what happens when beliefs don't
seem so straightforward? What about deeply held political or religious
convictions that seem immune to contrary evidence? And how do we understand the unshakeable, yet seemingly irrational, beliefs of someone experiencing a clinical delusion? Are these even beliefs at all? Or do we instead need to broaden our understanding of beliefs by incorporating an emotional component, the feeling that “something is true”, or “feels right” into our account of beliefs?
Join host Professor Paul Formosa and guest Professor Miriam Schleifer McCormick as they discuss whether belief is an emotion.
We discuss Miriam’s recent book: McCormick, M. S. (2025).
Belief as Emotion. University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198875826.001.0001
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By Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values, and Ethics (CAVE)We typically think of beliefs as cognitive representations of the world that should be responsive to evidence and truth. In contrast, emotions are very different sorts of mental states: they seem to be non-cognitive, perhaps non-representational, and they have a certain feeling to
them. Or so the traditional story goes. But what happens when beliefs don't
seem so straightforward? What about deeply held political or religious
convictions that seem immune to contrary evidence? And how do we understand the unshakeable, yet seemingly irrational, beliefs of someone experiencing a clinical delusion? Are these even beliefs at all? Or do we instead need to broaden our understanding of beliefs by incorporating an emotional component, the feeling that “something is true”, or “feels right” into our account of beliefs?
Join host Professor Paul Formosa and guest Professor Miriam Schleifer McCormick as they discuss whether belief is an emotion.
We discuss Miriam’s recent book: McCormick, M. S. (2025).
Belief as Emotion. University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198875826.001.0001