[Buddha-l] Republicans are Happier?

[Richard Hayes]

On Sat, 2008-02-23 at 16:25 -0800, Katherine Masis wrote:

> Richard Hayes wrote:
>    
>   “It is utterly impossible to be mistaken about how one feels.”
>    
>   I disagree.  It is completely possible, and it happens more than we
> care to admit, that we are mistaken about how we feel.  I don’t know
> about the East, but we in the West are for the most part so out of
> touch with our bodies and our feelings, that we often think we feel A
> when we’re really feeling B.  For example, guys tend to think they’re
> mad when they’re really sad; gals tend to think they’re sad when
> they’re really mad.

This raises an interesting epistemological issue. How can anyone know
what a person is really feeling (and therefore know that what the person
claims to be feeling is somehow delusional)? Surely, no one is in a
position to correct another person's self-reporting. At the very most,
one can guess. At the worst, telling other people what they are REALLY
feeling emotionally is an attempt to diminish them and gain control over
them.

> researchers in these cases are only interested in subjects’
> perceptions of themselves, not in whether those perceptions are
> accurate or not.

Until someone can demonstrate that there is a way of actually knowing
whether a person's perceptions of his own emotions are accurate, there
is no way of knowing for sure that claims of inaccuracy are not
unfounded assertions driven more by ideology than by either reason or
empirical science.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico