Criteria for Truth: Week 2

Today in class we talked about a few of the criteria for truth. One of the criteria was emotions; sometimes you just have a feeling that something is true, but do not necessarily have physical proof or evidence for it, you only have that feeling. I was thinking about how some fields of study such as the hard sciences discredit how emotions play into some aspects of the truth. They want facts, or hard information. This is also the case in criminal justice or law which is the career I'm interested in going into. I believe there are certain situations that call for emotions to be factored in with the truth. For example, say there is a custody battle and the mother claims that she has a feeling the father physically abuses the child. She has no physical evidence of this just a gut feeling about. I feel that in this situation motherly instinct or that emotional connection between mother and child adds validity to her claim. Of course there are also examples of how emotions have been abused when it didn't support the truth. So from this I got that emotions are important when determining truths, but cannot really stand alone. This will be helpful not only for this class, but in my career field should i decide to become a lawyer.