Abstract

In the contemporary philosophical debate, the term “recalcitrant emotionsµ denotes the phenomenon whereby someone feels an emotion contrary to their explicit beliefs (like when someone is afraid of flying, while claiming not to believe that it is dangerous). Emotional recalcitrance has been commonly used as an objection to strong cognitivism, according to which emotions are based on the subject’s beliefs, insofar as – the critics argue – it would force us to ascribe to the subject an excessive degree of irrationality, comparing recalcitrant emotions to contradictory beliefs. For this reason, many philosophers have developed perceptual theories which describe emotions as forms of perception, allowing us to explain recalcitrant emotions without attributing to the subject contradictory beliefs, treating them as perceptual illusions. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, I argue that perceptual theories are flawed, for they fail to account for the irrationality of recalcitrant emotions. Second, I hold that empirical results from psychology and behavioral economics help us to explain this phenomenon in cognitive terms, showing that we are not perfectly rational decision makers (hence, we can fall into contradictions), that our probabilistic evaluations about risk are affected by cognitive biases and that it is easy to explain why it is so difficult to get rid of particularly internalized beliefs