Emotion, Cognition, and the Virtue of Flexibility

Notes

1

Throughout the book, I will often speak of “disrupting and changing habits and beliefs” without making a distinction in how this would work for habits on the one hand, and beliefs on the other. Of course, there are important differences in how we change habits and how we change beliefs. One plausible difference is that we have less voluntary control over our beliefs than over our habits. I will leave out these complex differences for the purposes of the argument in this book. It would be an interesting follow-up investigation to ask exactly how the adjustment of beliefs and habits must be thought of, respectively, when they are disrupted by non-cognitive emotions. We will, however, get a rough idea about the commonalities and differences ...