Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 206-216, July 2022. This paper develops the claim that epistemic feelings are affective experiences. To establish some diagnostic criteria, characteristic features of affective experiences are outlined: valence and arousal. Then, in order to pave the way for showing that epistemic feelings have said features, an initial challenge coming from introspection is addressed. Next, the paper turns to empirical findings showing that we can observe physiological and behavioural proxies for valence and arousal in epistemic (...) tasks that typically rely on epistemic feelings. Finally, it is argued that the affective properties do not only correlate with epistemic feelings but that we, in fact, capitalise on these affective properties to perform the epistemic tasks. In other words: the affective properties in question constitute epistemic feelings. (shrink)

Compared to other forms of memory, episodic memory is commonly viewed as special for being distinctively metarepresentational and, relatedly, uniquely human. There is an inherent ambiguity in these conceptions, however, because “episodic memory” has two closely connected yet subtly distinct uses, one designating the recollective experience and the other designating the underlying neurocognitive system. Since experience and system sit at different levels of theorizing, their disentanglement is not only necessary but also fruitful for generating novel theoretical hypotheses. To show this, (...) I first argue that accepting the phenomenally conscious contents of episodic remembering as metarepresentational does not necessitate a metarepresentational conception of the episodic memory system. In its stead, I sketch an alternative account on which the metarepresentational character of episodic remembering is generated through the interaction of first-order outputs of the episodic memory system with other neurocognitive components of the brain. Complemented with a first-order account of the memory system, the system-experience distinction further supplies a novel understanding of the human uniqueness of episodic recollection, one that is compatible with there being an evolutionarily conserved episodic memory system. Overall, by distinguishing the two equivocal senses of “episodic memory” in our theorizing, we unearth an opportunity to understand how the distinctive phenomenology of our episodic recollection is related to and implemented in the cognitive architecture. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a psychologically-informed philosophical account of the phenomenology of episodic remembering. The literature on epistemic or metacognitive feelings has grown considerably in recent years, and there are persuasive reasons, both conceptual and empirical, in favour of the view that the phenomenology of remembering—autonoetic consciousness, as Tulving influentially referred to it, or the feeling of pastness, as we will refer to it here—is an epistemic feeling, but few philosophical treatments of this phenomenology as an epistemic feeling have (...) so far been proposed. Building on insights from the psychological literature, we argue that a form of feeling-based metacognition is involved in episodic remembering and develop an integrated metacognitive feeling-based view that addresses several key aspects of the feeling of pastness, namely, its status as a feeling, its content, and its relationship to the first-order memories the phenomenology of which it provides. (shrink)

Language understanding comes with a particular kind of phenomenology. It is often observed that when listening to utterances in a familiar language, competent language users can have experiences of understanding the meanings of these utterances. The nature of such experiences is a much debated topic. In this paper, I develop a new proposal according to which experiences of understanding are a particular kind of epistemic feelings of fluency that result from evaluative monitoring processes. The perceptual experience that accompanies linguistic comprehension (...) results from the deployment of early stage auditory processes of speech perception that lead to the recognition of words. (shrink)