Thus a woman is caught in a doublebind. What this suggests is not only that a sharp split between reason and emotion or thought and affect may lead to a distorted understanding of judgment and agency, but further that insofar as such assumptions define a set of cultural conditions, they also condition the agency , the very behaviors themselves of individuals. Responses This account of things is unsettling, although not for that reason alone unjustified. Another more radical approach would be to attempt to formulate a different conceptual framework. There have been alternative philosophical views proposed, for example by some of the classical American pragmatists and subsequent philosophers who were influenced by them.
Emotion is a mode of intelligence.
Emotion . . . is a mode of behavior which is purposive, or has an intellectual content, and which also reflects itself into feeling . . . Notice, here emotion performs appraisive and cognitive functions. Moreover, the act of believing something to be true may be instrumental in making it true. James also argued for the reality of relations and rejected atomistic views of experience and the self. For example, an action may itself be a judgment.