This paper is concerned with the roles played by emotions in rationality, a topic which has been generally, but unjustifiably, ignored by epistemologists. Silence on this matter is, we believe, indicative of the overly narrow view that epistemologists have had of their field. Whatever else we might accomplish by considering the rational role of emotions, we hope to motivate a number of questions and philosophical contexts not commonly considered by epistemologists.

Everyone knows that rationality depends on the doxastic state of the individual. Thus, whether an action, decision, inference, or belief is rational depends on what other things the individual believes, or is justified in believing in the given situation. This holds not just for rationality, but for epistemic norms in general. Many such normative statuses apply directly to beliefs, and all depend at least indirectly on the background doxastic status of the agent. In this paper, it is our purpose to argue that rationality, and epistemic norms more generally, depend as well on the emotional states of the agent.