The nature of worry(ing)

We all find ourselves worrying at one point or another, and we have an intuitive sense of what is communicated by phrases such as ‘I’m worried about this’ or ‘I can’t stop worrying about that’. Despite worry’s ubiquity, however, it is not altogether clear what exactly worrying is, or why it is we worry. And, surprisingly, there has been no dedicated philosophical account given of the nature of worry specifically, although there is a body of psychological literature concerned with it as well as a recent insurgence of philosophical literature concerned with the nature of anxiety. My aim in this paper, therefore, is to provide such an account. I here provide an account of the nature of worry.

On the view I develop, worry is to be understood as a form of affectively motivated cognition. More specifically, I argue that worrying is a cognitive activity constituted by our engagement with forms of practical or epistemic reasoning, supplemented by imaginative engagement and motivated by anxiety. I develop this view primarily by marrying together considerations from the psychological literature on worry and the philosophical literature on anxiety. With this characterization in place, I then go on to make some novel claims about why exactly it is that we worry. The upshot should be an account of worry that addresses the questions of what it is and why we do it.