In this SEP article on emotion, it talks about how one can experience fear even in situations where there seems to be no threat. For example, one may be in a tall building with a transparent glass floor and feel an intense tinge of fear if one fears heights, even if the building and the floor have had many years of reliably holding up.
My question is how can one show that one’s fear response, or anger response, or really any sort of emotional response does not indicate any sort of truth about the matter at hand except the acknowledgement that one is feeling fear itself. For example, how can one show, using reason, that just because you feel fear that a person is cheating on you, does not imply that that person is cheating on you.
For example, if my partner has been loyal all the time, and yet I still feel fear, how can I through reason show that this fear is unrelated to the actual evidence at hand. I am having trouble understanding how this can be non circularly shown.
For example, it seems reasonable to state that just because one feels fear of X does not imply that X is true. However, one can simply further fear and doubt this very statement resulting in the question “But what if my fear does imply that X is true?” resulting in an infinite cycle that seems to be hard to get away from in my head.
Note that my question is not about the therapeutical question of how to reduce the fear nor is it about whether fear is rational in a pragmatic sense such as in the case of a fear of bugs even when the bug presents no harm.
My question is how one can show, through reason, that their fear of X does not imply that X is true. Can a feeling, by itself, be seen as evidence of some truth about the world?