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.
Cognitive feelings are affective states concerning the subject’s own mental processes and capacities. They include the feeling of knowing, the feeling of error, the feeling of confidence, and the feeling of forgetting, to name but a few. A question that remains open concerns their underlying mechanism. We know that cognitive feelings correlate with certain process properties, most notably process fluency, but there is no encompassing theory of how they emerge. We know that cognitive feelings influence behaviour, but there is no definite notion of the way in which they do so. Predictive Processing, a theoretical framework that conceives the brain as a hierarchical prediction machine, provides a promising way to tackle these issues. In return, a good theory of cognitive feelings will further our understanding of the interconnections between mental activity and affective states within the Predictive Processing paradigm. In this paper, we offer an account of cognitive feelings within the framework of Predictive Processing in an effort to shed light on how cognitive feelings emerge and how they guide mental action.
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