Emotion, Intuition & Identity (DP IB Theory of Knowledge): Revision Note

Emotion, intuition & identity

• Emotion involves feelings, bodily responses and patterns of thought that signal to knowers that something is important

• Emotions can guide attention towards certain people, events or ideas and away from others

• Different cultures and communities may teach different rules for expressing and interpreting emotion, shaping how emotion contributes to knowledge

Emotion, judgement and bias

• Emotion is often seen as a threat to good judgment because strong feelings can push knowers to support or reject beliefs without enough evidence

  • E.g. fear or anger can lead knowers to interpret neutral information as offensive or wrong; this is an example of bias

• Emotions can be helpful when someone has lots of experience in a situation because the emotion may draw attention to something that would otherwise be missed

  • E.g. a doctor might feel concern about a patient even before test results come back due to outcomes in previous, similar cases 

    • Note: this overlaps with intuition, but the focus here is on the emotional signal

• Reflecting on emotional responses can help knowers decide when emotion is a helpful signal and when it might be distorting reasoning

Intuition as pattern recognition

• Intuition is a form of immediate, non-conscious judgement, often described as a "gut feeling", or a sense that something is right or wrong

  • In areas where knowers have extensive practice, intuitions may arise quickly, for example when a musician senses a mistake or a doctor notices an unusual set of symptoms

• Intuitions can be unreliable when based on stereotypes or limited experience, so they often need to be checked using other methods of acquiring knowledge

Identity and the knower

• A knower’s identity includes features such as:

  • gender 

  • culture 

  • language 

  • religion 

  • class 

  • interests

  • life experiences

• Identity can shape:

  • what knowers notice 

  • which areas of knowledge knowers see as familiar or distant

  • which sources of knowledge seem credible or trustworthy

• Reflecting on identity can help knowers recognise their own assumptions and consider how different identities might lead to different knowledge claims

Combining emotion, intuition and identity

• Emotions and intuitions are often tied to identity, because people’s past experiences and group memberships influence what feels obvious, natural or offensive

• Considering how emotion, intuition and identity interact can help knowers understand why sincere people can hold very different beliefs about the same issues