Emotional Intelligence as an Intellectual Virtue: Theoretical Analysis and Empirical Assessment

Abstract

Virtue theory has long recognized the significance of emotion for cognition, yet little philosophical research has been dedicated to identifying an intellectual virtue related to emotion. Applying recent work in virtue epistemology reveals emotional intelligence (EI) to be an intellectual virtue, as analysis demonstrates EI’s ability to enhance cognition. High EI persons better attend to epistemically-significant features of the environment, which could explain the significance of stakes for knowledge attribution. While testing did not confirm higher EI with stakes sensitivity (the hypothesis), study methods, including stakes vignettes, inadvertently caused the hypothesis to be disconfirmed.

Keywords

• emotional intelligence
• virtue epistemology
• experimental philosophy
• stakes