There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even young children have a (...) capacity for procedural metacognition raises the question of whether and how these abilities are involved in conceptual development. More specifically, are there developmental changes in metacognitive abilities that have a wholescale effect on the way children acquire new concepts and replace existing concepts? We show that there is already evidence of at least one plausible example of such a link and argue that these connections deserve to be investigated systematically. (shrink)

Experimenters claim some nonhuman mammals have metacognition. If correct, the results indicate some animal minds are more complex than ordinarily presumed. However, some philosophers argue for a deflationary reading of metacognition experiments, suggesting that the results can be explained in first-order terms. We agree with the deflationary interpretation of the data but we argue that the metacognition research forces the need to recognize a heretofore underappreciated feature in the theory of animal minds, which we call Unity. The disparate mental states (...) of an animal must be unified if deflationary accounts of metacognition are to hold and untoward implications avoided. Furthermore, once Unity is acknowledged, the deflationary interpretation of the experiments reveals an elevated moral standing for the nonhumans in question. (shrink)

Joint action enables us to achieve our goals more efficiently than we otherwise could, and in many cases to achieve goals that we could not otherwise achieve at all. It also presents us with the challenge of determining when and to what extent we should rely on others to make their contributions. Interpersonal commitments can help with this challenge – namely by reducing uncertainty about our own and our partner’s future actions, particularly when tempting alternative options are available to one (...) or more parties. How we know whether a commitment is in place need not, however, be based on an explicit, identifiable event; in many cases, joint action is stabilized by individuals’ experience of an implicit sense of commitment, which is sensitive to subtle situational cues such as the effort costs invested by one or more agents. While an emerging body of work has investigated the conditions under which a sense of commitment may emerge and/or be strengthened, little attention has been paid to the conditions under which people are comfortable dissolving commitments. Specifically, what are the factors that modulate people’s motivation and which determine whether circumstances merit the dissolution of a commitment? After evaluating and rejecting the answers to this question suggested by standard approaches to commitment, we develop a new approach. The core insight which we articulate and defend is that, when considering whether new information or changing circumstances merit the dissolution of a commitment, people virtually bargain with their partners, performing a simulation of a bargaining process with the other person, including imagining how the other will feel and act towards them, and what effect this will have on them. The output of this simulation is a consciously accessible, affective state which provides motivation either to dissolve the commitment or to persist in it. Overall, our account expands our understanding of the phenomenology of being motivated to act committed in joint activity, an area in which existing accounts of interpersonal commitment fall short. (shrink)

In our response, we address four themes arising from the commentaries. First, we discuss the distinction between cognition and metacognition and show how to draw it within our framework. Next, we explain how metacognition differs from social cognition. The underlying mechanisms of metacognitive development are then elucidated in terms of interaction patterns. Finally, we consider measures of metacognition and suitable methods for investigating it.

Two main theories about metacognition are reviewed, each of which claims to provide a better explanation of this phenomenon, while discrediting the other theory as inappropriate. The paper claims that in order to do justice to the complex phenomenon of metacognition, we must distinguish two levels of this capacity—each having a different structure, a different content and a different function within the cognitive architecture. It will be shown that each of the reviewed theories has been trying to explain only one (...) of the two levels and that, consequently, the conflict between them can be dissolved. The paper characterizes the high-level as a rationalizing level where the subject uses concepts and theories to interpret her own behavior and the low-level as a controlling level where the subject exploits epistemic feelings to adjust her cognitive activities. Finally, the paper explores three kinds of interaction between the levels. (shrink)

This review essay discusses three articles from the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education concerned with outlining the connection between cognitive science and critical thinking. All of the authors explain how recent findings in cognitive science, such as research on heuristics and cognitive biases might be incorporated into the critical thinking curriculum. The authors also elaborate on how recent findings in metacognition can reshape critical thinking pedagogy. For instance, the essays articulate how critical thinking instructors would be wise (...) to broaden the scope of traditional critical thinking content by instructing students in the metacognitive strategies of self-regulation, cognitive monitoring, and evaluation in order to encourage better decision making both inside and outside the classroom. (shrink)

1. Introduction 2. Reward-Guided Decision Making 3. Content in the Model 4. How to Deflate a Metarepresentational Reading Proust and Carruthers on metacognitive feelings 5. A Deflationary Treatment of RPEs? 5.1 Dispensing with prediction errors 5.2 What is use of the RPE focused on? 5.3 Alternative explanations—worldly correlates 5.4 Contrast cases 6. Conclusion Appendix: Temporal Difference Learning Algorithms.

While the term “metacognition” is sometimes used to refer to any form of thinking about thinking, in cognitive psychology, it is typically reserved for thinking about one’s own thinking, as opposed to thinking about others’ thinking. How metacognition in this more specific sense relates to other-directed mindreading is one of the main theoretical issues debated in the literature. This article considers the idea that we make use of the same or a largely similar package of resources in conceptually interpreting our (...) own mind as we do in interpreting others’. I assume that a capacity for other-directed mindreading is minimally shared with our great-ape relatives, but I argue that the architecture of this system had to be substantially modified before it could efficiently and adaptively be turned inwards on one’s own mind. I contend that an important piece of the overall evolutionary explanation here likely concerns selection pressures arising from the domain of conversational interaction. Specifically, drawing on work carried out in the human interaction studies tradition (e.g., conversation analysis), I argue that the smooth to-and-fro of conversational interaction can be seen to heavily depend on metacommunicative capacities, which, in turn, are underpinned by metacognitive capacities. I conclude with a thumbnail sketch of an evolutionary account of the emergence of these metacognitive capacities in the human line. Their appearance and spread – whether via genes, cultural learning, or more likely, some combination of the two – helps to explain the transition from great-ape communication to human conversation. (shrink)

This paper argues that group attitudes can be assessed in terms of standards of rationality and that group-level rationality need not be due to individual-level rationality. But it also argues that groups cannot be collective epistemic agents and are not collectively responsible for collective irrationality. I show that we do not need the concept of collective epistemic agency to explain how group-level irrationality can arise. Group-level irrationality arises because even rational individuals can fail to reason about how their attitudes will (...) combine with those of others. In some cases they are morally responsible for this failure, in others they are not. Moreover, the argument for collective epistemic agency is incoherent because reasons-for-groups are ipso facto reasons-for-individual. Instead of talking about reasons-for-groups, we should therefore distinguish between self-regarding reasons and group-regarding reasons. Both kinds of reasons are reasons-for-individuals. These conceptual considerations in favour of moderate individualism are strengthened by an analysis of our moral practice of responding to collective shortfalls of rationality and by the unpalatable moral implications of collectivism about epistemic agency. There is no need to change the subject. Groups can be rational or irrational, but they do not reason. (shrink)

Real agents rely, when forming their beliefs, on imperfect informational sources (sources which deliver, even under normal conditions of operation, both accurate and inaccurate information). They therefore face the ‘endorsement problem’: how can beliefs produced by endorsing information received from imperfect sources be formed in an epistemically acceptable manner? Focussing on the case of episodic memory and drawing on empirical work on metamemory, this article argues that metacognition likely plays a crucial role in explaining how agents solve the endorsement problem.

Clark and Chalmers claim that an external resource satisfying the following criteria counts as a memory: the agent has constant access to the resource; the information in the resource is directly available; retrieved information is automatically endorsed; information is stored as a consequence of past endorsement. Research on forgetting and metamemory shows that most of these criteria are not satisfied by biological memory, so they are inadequate. More psychologically realistic criteria generate a similar classification of standard putative external memories, but (...) the criteria still do not capture the function of memory. An adequate account of memory function, compatible with its evolution and its roles in prospection and imagination, suggests that external memory performs a function not performed by biological memory systems. External memory is thus not memory. This has implications for: extended mind theorizing, ecological validity of memory research, the causal theory of memory. (shrink)

Proponents of the problem of animal suffering claim that the millions of years of apparent nonhuman animal pain and suffering provides evidence against the existence of God. Neo-Cartesianism attempts to avoid this problem mainly by denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness in nonhuman animals. However, neo-Cartesian options regarding animal minds have failed to compel many. In this essay, I explore an answer to the problem of animal suffering inspired by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Instead of focusing on phenomenal consciousness, (...) the neo-Thomistic view of animal minds focuses on self-awareness. After proposing and providing evidence for this view, I conclude that nonhuman animal suffering is not morally significant. (shrink)

A sensible epistemologist may not see how she could know that she is not a brain in a vat ; but she doesn’t panic. She sticks with her empirical beliefs, and as that requires, believes that she is not a BIV. (She does not inferentially base her belief that she is not a BIV on her empirical knowledge—she rejects that ‘Moorean’ response to skepticism.) Drawing on the psychological literature on metacognition, I describe a mechanism that’s plausibly responsible for a sensible (...) epistemologist coming to believe she is not a BIV. I propose she thereby knows that she is not a BIV. The particular belief-forming mechanism employed explains why she overlooks this account of how she knows she is not a BIV, making it seem that there is no way for her to know it. I argue this proposal satisfactorily resolves the skeptical puzzle. (shrink)

Starting from Proust’s distinction between the self-attributive and self-evaluative views on metacognition, this paper presents a third view: self-mindshaping. Based on the notion of mindshaping as the core of social cognition, the self-mindshaping view contends that mindshaping abilities can be turned on one’s own mind. Against the self-attributive view, metacognition is not a matter of accessing representations to metarepresent them but of giving shape to those representations themselves. Against the self-evaluative view, metacognition is not blind to content but relies heavily (...) on it. We characterize our view in terms of four issues that, according to Proust, distinguish the previous approaches, namely, whether metacognitive mechanisms are the same as those employed to access other minds, whether metacognitive control requires conceptual representation, whether metacognition is propositional, and whether metacognitive access is linked to mental action. After describing some of the mechanisms for self-mindshaping, we show how this view regards metacognition as grounded on social interaction mechanisms, conceptually driven, possibly, but not necessarily, propositional, and engaged in the practical regulation of mental states. Finally, we examine the prospects for the primacy of self-mindshaping as the primary metacognitive function. We argue that self-attributive processes typically subserve the practical goals emphasized by the mindshaping view, and that the evaluative role played by procedural metacognition can be grounded on social cues rather than on experiential feelings. Even if this is not enough to claim the primacy of self-mindshaping, it still appears as a third kind of metacognition, not reducible to the other two. (shrink)

A widespread view in philosophy claims that inner speech is closely tied to human metacognitive capacities. This so-called format view of inner speech considers that talking to oneself allows humans to gain access to their own mental states by forming metarepresentation states through the rehearsal of inner utterances (section 2). The aim of this paper is to present two problems to this view (section 3) and offer an alternative view to the connection between inner speech and metacognition (section 4). According (...) to this alternative, inner speech (meta)cognitive functions derivate from the set of commitments we mobilize in our communicative exchanges. After presenting this commitment-based approach, I address two possible objections (section 5). (shrink)

In summaries of “best practices” for pedagogy, one typically encounters enthusiastic advocacy for metacognition. Some researchers assert that the body of evidence supplied by decades of education studies indicates a clear pedagogical imperative: that if one wants their students to learn well, one must implement teaching practices that cultivate students’ metacognitive skills. -/- In this dissertation, I counter that education research does not impose such a mandate upon instructors. We lack sufficient and reliable evidence from studies that use the appropriate (...) research design to validate the efficacy of metacognitive skill-building interventions (not just evaluate their relationship to learning outcomes). I argue that improved academic outcomes following these interventions aren’t necessarily mediated by increased metacognitive skills; rather, enhanced student performance can be accounted for by other factors that accompany metacognitive training, particularly the explicit provision of domain-specific knowledge. -/- On the way to this conclusion, I elaborate some complications and controversies surrounding “metacognition.” This is a sprawling and nebulous construct, which makes generalizations about its pedagogical value dubious from the outset. Moreover, it is unclear the extent to which the end goal of metacognitive skill-building (cognitive self-mastery, involving knowledge of and control over our own minds) is even possible, given our mental architecture; some cognitive scientists allege that we are subject to phenomenological illusions which make this seem more achievable than it actually is. -/- I also attempt to provide an account of how metacognitive skill-building could receive glowing endorsements from educators and education researchers, even though its conceptual and empirical underpinnings are flimsy. The error theory I offer identifies two major factors that may foster belief in the efficacy of metacognitive training: goalpost-shifting around the objective of such efforts, and motivated reasoning in defense of the desirable conclusion that educators can significantly reshape students’ minds and unlock their intellectual potential through simple pedagogical interventions. (shrink)