Emotion plays a more central role in epistemic justification than we have previously realized. For example, the virtue of open-mindedness is frequently spoken of in the literature of virtue epistemology, but it hasn't been pointed out that open-mindedness requires an empathic receptivity to the opinions and arguments of others that results in some degree of intellectual ”sympathy” with views that differ from one's own. And belief itself involves favoring one way of seeing things over others, and favoring here is an emotion or affect just as much as it is when we favor one political party or nephew over another. Belief not only involves emotion, but can be seen, in neo-Fregean terms, as the saturated emotional state that results when a saturated proposition saturates an unsaturated general context of favoring.But epistemology needs to tell us how ordinary beliefs can be justified in the face of familiar skeptical doubts, and we can make use of the idea of receptivity to help us accomplish this. A person who on skeptical grounds insists on questioning every relationship and emotion in their life shows a lack of receptivity to what life has brought their way, and that counts as a form of practical irrationality. But by the same token, to question ordinary perceptual or memory beliefs because of the doubts raised by epistemological skepticism is to be unreceptive to one's own naturally existing beliefs in a way that is epistemically less than rational.We are well on our way toward a sentimentalist epistemology.