Bond. Positive Emotions for Group Cognition

BOND consists of a conceptual analysis and model building about the role of emotions in the social cooperative epistemic practices. This very multidisciplinary field of research focuses on the different roles that emotions play in our social cognition, moving from the study of coordinated and joint actions to the normative realm of cooperative commitments, and addressing it to the epistemic realm of group knowledge.

The aim of the project is to offer a systematic exploration of the role of specific emotions for the establishment, support, and enhancement of cooperative bonds in group knowledge. This concerns the epistemological value of emotions in the social cognitive agency, which is a prominent and cutting-edge research programme in social epistemology and philosophy of mind. The idea is then to build on this systematic exploration of the affective terrain of cooperation to offer a new perspective on the
specific functionality of certain emotions, like love, happiness, gratitude, compassion, and hope, in which those emotions could be thought to be ‘beneficial’—viz., the causal role in driving cognition as motives for cooperative thinking.

This project is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I’m developing it at FU Berlin with Prof. Dr. Jan Slaby.