Belief and Emotion, Belief and Action

Abstract

This chapter discusses how belief informs Roman religious emotion and Roman religious action. It begins by examining emotion and the Intentionality of emotion. Emotions were constitutive components of Roman religious psychology and religious action, and they typically owed their very existence to religious beliefs. For one cannot feel anger, joy, or fear about a state of affairs unless one represents that state of affairs, that is to say, entertains a belief about how things stand in the world. The chapter considers how cult action, by all accounts a central feature of Roman religion, depended causally on belief, among other Intentional states. Beyond individual wants and desires, social norms also served as pervasive and potent motivators to action in the world of Roman cult. The motivational power of any “desire-independent” social norm or of any package of such norms—which can be called a deontology—flows from agents' beliefs about the content of the norms and the legitimacy of the obligations the norms impose. The chapter also looks at action theory and folk psychology.