EPISTEMOLOGY WORKSHOP
June 4, 2014
Are noetic feelings a potential source of epistemic
entitlement?
Joëlle Proust
institut Jean-Nicod
Paris
http://dividnorm.ens.fr
Outline
1. What is the epistemological puzzle raised by
noetic feelings?
2. Epistemological externalism vs internalism
about what counts as justification &
knowledge
3. The epistemological status of noetic
feelings: are they « virtues »?
1. What is the epistemological
puzzle raised by noetic feelings?
Noetic Feelings
• Are experienced before and after an
epistemic action, with a predictive or
retrodictive-evaluative function
 They have the function of monitoring
epistemic actions, such as trying to
discriminate, remember, solve a problem, etc.
First function : prediction & evaluation
Consists in evaluating a gradient of likely
correctness, which involves comparing an
observed with an expected value.
 In Self-probing: they predict how feasible the
cognitive action is, given a stored standard
 In Post-evaluating: they report how
successful the action has been, given a
stored standard
Noetic Feelings
Predictive
Retrodictive
 cognitive effortfulness
 Feeling of being right
 Familiarity
 Feeling uncertain
 knowing
 Tip of the tongue
about one’s own
performance
The embedded structure of cognitive
action (CA)
Epistemic action:
Epistemic norm(s)
Instrumental action: norm of utility
2 types of monitoring depending on one’s
Cognitive action
• Most cognitive actions are « reactively » monitored by noetic
feelings.
• Some important cognitive actions, however, can be
« strategically » monitored by beliefs and plans of actions.
Second function: motivation to form an
epistemic decision
Once a performance is appraised, noetic
feelings are able to motivate a decision in
agreement with a given graded appraisal
(e.g., launch the cognitive action/accept or
reject its cognitive output)
An agent may, however, decide not to follow
his/her feeling in making an epistemic
decision
Third function: epistemological ?
• Noetic feelings seem to allow agents to reliably
evaluate their epistemic states
• Are they, however, a potential basis of agents’
being entitled to taking their perception,
memory, etc. to be valid?
• An argument against their epistemic role is that,
although they influence epistemic decision, they
are not based on the content of the state which
they evaluate, contrary to the subject’s own
experience.
Feelings are blind to contents
• Bayesian Hypothesis: The informational input
for predictive « noetic affordances » consists in
the structural, dynamic properties of the mind
while it prepares to act mentally, or once it has
acted, eg:
• Processing onset, latency, intensity and
increased coherence of cognitive activity over
time predict cognitive success.
Our puzzle
• Noetic feelings are reliably
predicting/evaluating success in an ongoing
task in their own functional contexts
• Outside the latter, they are a source of
epistemic illusion.
They motivate epistemic decisions in a swift,
graded and economical way.
• They are blind to the contents they seem to
be about.
 Are they a source of epistemic entitlement?
• To address this question, the issue of
epistemological externalism vs. Internalism
needs to be articulated.
2. Epistemological externalism vs
internalism about what counts as
justification & knowledge
Entitlement vs Justification
• Internalism: when a person knows a proposition, she
does so on the basis of something such as evidence
or good reasons
• 3 forms of internalism: Knowledge presupposes
– access to the basis of one’s knowledge
– a justifying mental state
– Fulfilment of one's intellectual duties or
responsibilities.
Entitlement vs Justification
Externalism defends reliabilism
•A belief is justified if, and only if, it results from
a reliable cognitive source or faculty that tends
to produce true beliefs.
•Animals and small children have knowledge
and thus have justified beliefs. But their beliefs
can't be justified in the way internalist
evidentialists conceive of justification  they
are « entitled » to know that P.
Attempts at reconciling internalism
and externalism through virtue
epistemology
Acquired cognitive character
epistemic virtue
The acquired intellectual virtues (or
competences) are habits and dispositions that
meet the reliabilist criterion of promoting true
beliefs and minimizing false ones.
For knowledge to be creditable to S
it should be shown not be acquired by mere
epistemic luck: if S knows P, then it ought not to
be the case that S could easily have been
wrong.
The notion of the 'integration of a cognitive
system’ (or epistemic virtue) has been proposed
as a way of eliminating epistemic luck.
"Belief amounts to
knowledge when apt:
that is to say, when its
correctness is
attributable to a
competence exercised in
appropriate conditions".
(p.92)
Sosa (2007)
Two kinds of epistemic virtues
• Those contributing to
« animal knowledge »
(AK)
• Those contributing to
« reflective
knowledge » (RK)
•
One has AK if one's judgments
and beliefs are direct (reliable)
responses to perception or
memory- with little or no benefit
of reflection or understanding”
[AK = apt belief]
• One has RK if one possesses
internal justification for believing
that one is getting at truth
reliably [RK is apt belief aptly
believed to be apt.]
Sosa (1991, 2007, 2009).
 2 types of justification
• Your belief that P is unreflectively justified
just in case it is virtuously formed, that is, has
its source in an intellectual virtue, unaided by
reflection on your cognitive powers or
circumstances.
• Your belief that P is reflectively justified just in
case you are justified in believing that it is
virtuously formed. (reflective justification
requires forming metabeliefs).
Relativity of justification
• Sosa’s proposal is that justification is relative
to environment. Relative to our actual
environment A, our automatic experiencebelief mechanisms count as virtues that yield
“much truth and justification”.
• Relative to a “demonic” environment, such
mechanisms are not virtuous and yield neither
truth nor justification.
• Reflective justification involves developing, to
a greater or lesser extent, a coherent
“endorsing perspective” on your cognitive
dispositions and environmental placement,
which together determine how well justified
your first-order beliefs are.
(Turri on Sosa, 2013)
What is the epistemic status of noetic feelings?
Noetic feelings have an epistemic role, in the
sense that they reliably influence epistemic
decision. How can we characterize this role?
– Do they offer a kind of internal access to one’s
reasons for asserting that P? No: A feeling is not
a reason.
– Are they justifying mental states (like perceivig
or remembering)? Not exactly: they do not have
the proper kind of content.
What is the epistemic status of noetic
feelings?
• Are they a virtue, i.e., a truth-conducive
competence that a subject may have or fail to
have, and that can be trained by performing
the same kind of cognitive task ?
• Yes! Several points, however, need to be
specified.
3. The epistemological status of
noetic feelings: are they « virtues »?
1 - Characterize the competence
involved
Do noetic feelings belong to the competences
for acquiring:
 animal knowledge?
 reflective knowledge ?
i.e. do they confer entitlement or justification?
If noetic feelings were concerned with acquiring
« animal knowledge », they would reliably register
the world (present or past).
However, they do not register facts (about the world
or the agent) : cf. evidence of nonhuman
evaluations of cognitive performance). Proust
(2013)
they merely evaluate whether animal beliefs are
likely to be correct, which seems to indicate that
they belong to competences involved in reflective
knowledge
If noetic feelings are taken to be « metabeliefs »,
i.e., beliefs through which an agent takes a
perspective on the reliability of the faculties
generating her belief, then they belong to higherorder virtues involved in reflective knowledge.
Noetic feelings, however, are only inspiring
metabeliefs in agents able to form them.
In non-humans, they rather inspire the desire to act
accordingly. These agents are not seeking truth in
first-order calls, but merely reward of their action.
If noetic feelings are taken to be « metabeliefs »,
i.e., beliefs through which an agent takes a
perspective on the reliability of the faculties
generating her belief, then they belong to higherorder virtues involved in reflective knowledge.
Noetic feelings, however, are only inspiring
metabeliefs in agents able to form them.
In non-humans, they rather inspire the desire to act
accordingly, with a belief like: « I can do it ». These
agents are not seeking truth in first-order calls, but
merely reward of their action.
To summarize:
Noetic feelings do not constitute animal knowledge,
because they do not register facts in the world or in
the self.
They may contribute to reliably filtering out uncertain
animal beliefs, in a context-sensitive way.
They only contribute to reflective knowledge when
they form the basis of meta-beliefs (unavailable to
non-humans).
2. Reliability vs responsibility
• Noetic feelings seem to be prima facie similar to the
kind of competence presented by Norman the
clairvoyant (Bonjour, 1980) .../
Norman the clairvoyant (BonJour 1980)
• Norman, under certain conditions that usually
obtain, is a completely reliable clairvoyant
with respect to certain kinds of subject
matter. He possesses no evidence or reasons
of any kind for or against the general
possibility of such a cognitive power, or for or
against the thesis that he possesses it. One
day Norman comes to believe that the
President is in New York City, though he has
no evidence either for or against his belief. In
fact the belief is true and results from his
clairvoyant power, under circumstances in
which it is completely reliable.
• If one is sensitive to the (partial) similarity
between Norman’s clairvoyant states and
noetic feelings, one might consider that even
though an agent may recognize the reliability
of her own noetic feelings, she should not
take responsibility for using them
competently.
Why responsibility can be claimed
1. Noetic feelings need to be trained over time. Younger
children are initially poor at evaluating their abilities to
perceive or remember.
In order to reach a better resolution and calibration, children
must attend to their ongoing cognitive actions and their
subsequent outcomes
• Resolution: ability to discriminate relative accuracy, e.g.
knowing which items are known better, which are known
worse.
• Calibration: the relation between level of confidence
(intensity in noetic feelings) and correctness of the decision
in the same cognitive action
Why responsibility can be claimed
• Agents can attend or fail to attend to:
– the feedback of their own cognitive actions (generating
or not calibrated feelings) (Stahl, Pieschl, S., & Bromme,
2006)
– The contexts where using their own noetic feelings is
adequate/ inadequate and illusory. Examples:
• Producing a judgment of learning on the basis of
present fluency (Koriat &Bjork, 2005).
• Attributing own fluency in a task to others. (Nussinson
& Koriat, 2008, Nagel 2012)
Why responsibility can be claimed
Noetic feelings are produced
• when epistemically reacting to contexts (little effort, small
stakes) (system 1 cognitive actions)
• not when considering analytically one’s reasons to believe
(system 2 cognitive actions) (effort, high stakes)
 It is the responsibility of a knower to adjust her effort to
the importance of an epistemic decision.
Proust (in print)
Conclusion
The epistemological status of noetic
feelings
To be reliable, noetic feelings must be
• Well-calibrated:
• Relevant to a given epistemic acceptance
• Sufficiently informative for an appropriate
decision to be taken.
 Noetic feelings do not constitute animal
knowledge, because they do not register facts in
the world or in the self.
 They monitor animal knowledge as well as some
bits of reflective knowlege.
 They may become topics for reflective knowledge
when they are redescribed in meta-beliefs and
metarules (for example: « don’t trust your noetic
feelings in such and such a context »)
 Training noetic feelings is a basic requirement for
developing rational cognitive agency.
Thanks for your attention
Questions welcome !