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Epistemic feelings, metacognition, and the Lima problem

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Abstract

Epistemic feelings like tip-of-the-tongue experiences, feelings of knowing, and feelings of confidence tell us when a memory can be recalled and when a judgment was correct. Thus, they appear to be a form of metacognition, but a curious one: they tell us about content we cannot access, and the information is supplied by a feeling. Evaluativism is the claim that epistemic feelings are components of a distinct, primitive metacognitive mechanism that operates on its own set of inputs. These inputs are heuristics that correlate with the presence of mental content that can’t be accessed directly. I will argue that evaluativism is unmotivated, unsupported, and ill-conceived. I will critique the philosophical and empirical arguments for evaluativism and conclude that there is no reason to posit a distinct mechanism to explain epistemic feelings. I will conclude, however, that epistemic feelings may constitute a nonconceptual form of metacognition, which if true is a significant claim.

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Notes

  1. This example is taken from Dokic (2012).

  2. Some evaluativists (e.g., Proust, 2013) reserve the term ‘metacognition’ for the System 1 version. This form of metacognition is described in detail in Sect. 2.3. I will use ‘metacognition’ to denote any intentional relation between mental states or processes. Thus, I will refer to theory-theoretic processes (Sect. 2.2) as ‘metacognition’, whereas evaluativists would use ‘metarepresentation’.

  3. Dokic (2012, p. 312, note 16) stops short of committing to the existence of a distinct mechanism, but does commit to what I will call ‘core evaluativism’.

  4. Arango-Munoz (2014a) offers this: “E-feelings are phenomenal experiences that point towards mental capacities, processes, and dispositions of the subject, such as knowledge, ignorance, or uncertainty” (p. 158). We will soon see that every part of this definition is controversial.

  5. Dokic claims that epistemic feelings register “internal physiological conditions and events” (2012, p. 307). Perrin, Michaelian, and Sant’Anna (2020) offer a phenomenological description of the feeling of remembering as one of “pastness, self, causality, and singularity.” In either case the properties picked out are arguably non-mental.

  6. Whether associative strength is a direct access account may depend on how one conceives the metaphysics of the relation.

  7. The traditional claim that memory consists in a “trace” of an original event stored in memory is contested by those who take memory to be an entirely reconstructive process (e.g., Michaelian, 2016). But the issue here is whether memory is the informational source of epistemic feelings, not whether that source is reconstructed or stored.

  8. Hart (1965) and Nelson and Narens (1990) are also cited by evaluativists as the sort of psychological direct-access accounts they oppose (Arango-Munoz, 2019; Proust, 2013). But Hart’s claims about a memory “monitor” are too brief and general to characterize as direct access, and while Nelson and Narens sometimes seem to favor direct access (p. 150) at other times they sound like evaluativists (p. 158).

  9. To take one example of the weaker evidence I will skip, Arango-Munoz (2019) cites work by Whittlesea and Williams (1998, 2001) in support of the claim that feelings of familiarity are causally sensitive to fluency. But Whittlesea and Williams operationalize feelings of familiarity as false alarms on a recognition task. False alarm rates are a first-order phenomenon, not a metacognitive measure.

  10. To take one example, Hertzog et al. (2010) examine varieties of the partial information heuristic, claiming that “All extant theories of FOKs reject the idea that individuals have direct access to information held in memory (p, 772).”

  11. Schwartz and Metcalfe (2010) also point out that the partial information heuristic is “compatible” with direct access.

  12. Carruthers (2011) makes such a distinction and claims that access to one’s own propositional attitudes is indirect, but he is no evaluativist. He denies that epistemic feelings have metacognitive content and suggests a direct causal relationship between memory and action for feelings of knowing (2017).

  13. The model does not posit that subjects access drift rate directly, which would implicitly involve a measure of RT. It posits different response criteria for different confidence levels. Higher quality evidence will tend to hit a higher confidence criterion in a given time interval.

  14. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Matthew Fulkerson, Eric Schwitzgebel, David Barner, Jonathan Cohen, Rick Grush, audiences at the 2020 meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and several anonymous referees for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

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    Nathaniel Greely

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Greely, N. Epistemic feelings, metacognition, and the Lima problem. Synthese 199, 6803–6825 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03094-8

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