Krisztina Biber
Department of Philosophy
Coordinator
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Central European University
Nador u. 9. | 1051 Budapest, Hungary
The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Joelle Proust (French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
on
Noetic feelings and mental agency
Tuesday, 21 October, 2014, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412
ABSTRACT
In contrast with bodily action, two kinds of motives have to be present for a mental action to develop. A mental action is performed because of some basic informational need, such as “remembering the name of the play”. Its performance, however, is also monitored for its validity, depending on the epistemic norm that is associated with the selected action (e.g., either accuracy, or exhaustive truth). Hence, when acting mentally, one must be able to predict one's ability to come up with a valid answer, given a norm, and to retrospectively
check its validity. This dual ability constitutes metacognition. Experimental evidence, as well as conceptual research, has shown that subjective experience plays an important role in sensitivity to epistemic norms: noetic feelings, such as feelings of knowing (FOK) and feelings of being right (FOR), are reliably guiding our epistemic decisions. These feelings raise various philosophically important questions. How do noetic feelings differ from other kinds of feelings? What is the representational format for subjectively appraising the validity of one's cognitive outputs? Is this format at least minimally penetrable by concept-based inferences? How and why can experience-based metacognition give way to analytic, conceptbased metacognition?