The Place of Emotions in Science

Thoughts underly our emotions. As psychologist Edith Packer (140) says, paraphrased, “When we are feeling something, we are thinking something.”
 
The opposite also is true—when we are thinking something, we are feeling something, which means we have emotions running through our minds whether we are aware of them or not.
 
Consciousness, to borrow a word from William James, is a stream, not separate compartments that can be shut off at will, though the evaluations that stand behind emotions can be repressed.
 
Scientists clearly have emotions, not just in their eureka moments of a major discovery, but in their typical workdays. Emotions are what motivate us.
 
When we acknowledge the presence of emotions in science, and scientists, we acknowledge that evaluations are present.  Behind every emotion the evaluation, as Packer argues, has two aspects, one universal that applies to all instances of a particular emotion, such as joy or anger, and one personal that includes all the concrete details of the moment when we have experienced the emotion.
 
Joy, for example, at the universal level means “I have achieved an important value.” Thus, “eureka”—or “I have found it,” the translation of the Greek—is a form of joy. The scientist’s personal evaluation—“all of my years of research have been worth it”—in the eureka moment might be expressed in behavior as energetic shouting and jumping up and down such that he almost knocks a beaker off the table. This would be a personal evaluation and experience that likely would last a long time in the scientist’s subconscious memories.*
 
It is this inner conversation or voice, as Packer describes personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge. Which means that knowledge, general or personal, is not “value-free” as the logical positivists for decades have insisted it must be.
 
Every emotion exhibits not just an evaluation, but also an action tendency, or urge to act. The scientist who, when young, is given a chemistry set for a birthday may later get excited in high school chemistry class and begin to think about a career in chemistry. Meeting and talking to professional chemists—a chemical engineer and a research chemist, for example—may help the young person solidify his or her career goals.
 
Going to work every day in an office or lab, after all, is motivated by our emotions of pleasure or pain we associate with the work.
 
Emotion is the driver of everything we do. Writers of both fact and fiction say they follow their emotions to come up with subjects, themes, and even the phrasing of sentences.  Many write “by ear,” more so than by the current rules of grammar and syntax.**
 
Whatever we have liked or disliked in our past, influences our present. Emotions contribute knowledge to our thought processes.  Those past emotions often are the sources of connections we make in the present, sometimes called creative insight, as well as guidance to follow particular lines of thought and experimentation.***
 
Repressed persons are also motivated by past emotions, though usually negative ones that they seek to avoid. Some who are repressed may appear in the present to experience no emotions.
 
A severely repressed scientist, for example, may exhibit a highly muted reaction to the eureka moment, such as a sober, unexpressive face and words that say, “This is good.” But the emotions, which means evaluations and values, are there at some level. Such a person is often desperately trying to avoid the error and appearance of the fallacy of the appeal to emotion.
 
Where does this fallacy come in to play? It is actually a simple notion that says it makes no sense to say or write, “It is true because I feel it.” This does not mean that we should not be motivated to become a scientist because of our emotions from the past or that we should not get excited over a eureka moment. It is indeed unfortunate that the repressed scientist does not jump up and down.
 
The point of the fallacy is that whatever emotions we have in the process of identifying a fact of reality, we must follow Aristotle’s laws of logic, especially the law of non-contradiction. Ayn Rand defines logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification.” Thus, in our work, we bring up our emotions to see if any of them are influencing our perceptions of reality.
 
If I am feeling that a leprechaun is on my desk instead of a glass of water, I assure you I am committing the fallacy. Or, consider the young man fired and jilted on the same day (in Individual Judgment and Introspection, 66–67); he feels that he will never find another job or lover. This is all the fallacy refers to, a feeling (in here) that contradicts the facts (out there).
 
Thus, scientists, I am quite certain, when coming up with a solution to a problem can, without guilt, go wild and crazy to celebrate!
 
 
* Another example: the universal evaluation of anger says, “An injustice has been done to me.” The personal evaluation would be the specific experiences of the moment when feeling anger at another person or institution.
 
** I have told students who could not come up with a term paper topic to “go with what grabs you,” meaning what your emotions are telling you. See this short essay on writing by ear and Ayn Rand (Kindle, 88): When writing, as opposed to editing, “you go by your emotions.”
 
*** For example, when researching my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I was pleasantly surprised to find a connection between Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Ayn Rand. They obviously do not agree with each other, but they nevertheless exhibit some similarities. See Linda Reardan, Emotions and Rational Values, chap. 4, for the fundamental explanation of how emotions contribute to thought.