Shaping your own mind: the self-mindshaping view on metacognition
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Shaping your own mind: the self-mindshaping view on metacognition Víctor Fernández-Castro 1
& Fernando
Martínez-Manrique 2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract 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 selfmindshaping, we show how this view regards metacognition as (1) grounded on social interaction mechanisms, (2) conceptually driven, (3) possibly, but not necessarily, propositional, and (4) 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 selfmindshaping, it still appears as a third kind of metacognition, not reducible to the other two. Keywords Metacognition . Self-mindshaping . Self-attribution . Self-evaluation .
Metarepresentation
* Fernando Martínez-Manrique [email protected] Víctor Fernández-Castro [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
V. Fernández-Castro, F. Martínez-Manrique
1 Introduction A key aspect of human agency and self-governance is metacognition, which can be characterized, in general terms, as the capacity for directing one’s cognitive processes towards one’s own cognition. Although it is difficult to make this characterization more precise without biasing it towards a specific view, it seems that there are two extremes that should be avoided. On the one hand, the idea that metacognition has to do with any cognitive process that intervenes in another cognitive process, which would mean that too many mental mechanisms would count as metacognitive. On the other hand, the idea that metacognition has to do with some sort of high-level knowledge of our mental processes and states –e.g., knowledge about how I remember, how I reason, or how I perceive– which would mean that perha
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