Explicit nonconceptual metacognition
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Explicit nonconceptual metacognition Peter Carruthers1
Accepted: 16 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The goal of this paper is to explore forms of metacognition that have rarely been discussed in the extensive psychological and philosophical literatures on the topic. These would comprise explicit (as opposed to merely implicit or procedural) instances of meta-representation of some set of mental states or processes in oneself, but without those representations being embedded in anything remotely resembling a theory of mind, and independent of deployment of any sort of conceptlike representation of the mental. Following a critique of some extant suggestions made by Nicholas Shea, the paper argues that appraisals of the value of cognitive effort involve the most plausible instances of this kind of metacognition. Keywords Cognitive control Effort Error signal Metacognition Metarepresentation Nonconceptual
1 Introduction Metacognition is generally defined in the field as ‘‘thinking about thinking’’ (Flavell 1979; Nelson and Narens 1990; Dunlosky and Metcalfe 2009). Although this definition as it stands might encompass thoughts about the thoughts of others (otherwise known as ‘‘mentalizing’’, or ‘‘theory of mind’’), the term is commonly understood as restricted to thoughts about one’s own thoughts and other mental processes. That is how it will be used here—at least initially. (The definition will be broadened shortly to include nonconceptual as well as thought-like representations of one’s own mental states.) & Peter Carruthers [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20912, USA
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P. Carruthers
For the most part psychologists have focused on the determinants and accuracy of a variety of explicitly-expressed metacognitive judgments (Dunlosky and Metcalfe 2009). These include judgments of learning, judgments of confidence, expressions of feeling-of-knowing and tip-of-the-tongue states, and judgments about the sources of one’s own knowledge. But psychologists have also investigated the development of these capacities through childhood, as well as declines in those capacities in older adulthood. Philosophers have rarely engaged with this literature directly. (Proust 2014, is one exception.) Instead, they have developed more-general theories of selfawareness and self-knowledge, debating to what extent it is, or is not, distinctively different in kind from our knowledge of the mental states of other people, for example (Bilgrami 2006; Carruthers 2011; Ferna´ndez 2013; Cassam 2014; Byrne 2018). There have also been extensive debates about the phylogenetic origins of selfawareness. Some have claimed that the so-called uncertainty-monitoring and memory-monitoring tasks employed with monkeys manifest at least simple forms of metacognitive awareness of their own mental states, either as such, or in a way that preadapts the representations in question to become components in full-blown selfawareness in humans (Smith et al. 2003, 2014). Some critics
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