Consciousness and Cognition 9, 220–223 (2000)

doi:10.1006/ccog.2000.0439, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Metacognition

Thomas O. Nelson

Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742E-mail: tnelson@glue.umd.edu

David Rosenthal’s article is thought-provoking in many useful ways. His notionof ‘‘higher order thought’’ is certainly congenial to the notion of an object-level anda meta-level in recent formulations of metacognition (e.g., Nelson & Narens, 1990)that Rosenthal cites. However, what I wish to focus upon here, in the spirit of sharpen-ing some of the ideas that he expressed, are a few quibbles and one major item thatdisappoints me about his article.

A FEW QUIBBLES

TOT vs FOK

Contrary to Rosenthal’s remark (in his Footnote 1) that ‘‘The tip-of-the-tonguephenomenon [hereafter TOT] that psychologists discuss involves having consciousaccess to partial information’’ (italics added), I would say that the TOT is the labelwe apply when a person reports partial aspects of the target. If there is any excessmeaning of TOT beyond that, I do not know what it is.

Rosenthal goes on to say that he will use the more common-sense usage ‘‘in whichwe have a vivid sense, sometimes accurate, that the name or information could beaccessed though we cannot. . . .’’ and subsequently he writes, ‘‘. . . to tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, which involve metacognitive access to information unavailablefor current recall.’’ Here is where I think the psychological literature may be of help,because those quoted portions pertain to what in psychology is referred to as thefeeling of knowing (FOK) (e.g., Hart, 1965; for additional citations, see Nelson,1992). The distinction in the psychological literature between the TOT and FOK isimportant and should be maintained. For instance, the TOT (e.g., recall of the firstletter of the target’s label) can give rise to an FOK, such as when the person predictscorrect recognition of the target label by virtue of knowing information that willallow the rejection of incorrect recognition alternatives (cf. Blake, 1973).

Speculations of the Mechanism for the FOK

Rosenthal writes, ‘‘When I have George Orwell’s real name on the tip of mytongue but cannot recall it, I am conscious that I am in some state that carries thedesired information, but I am not conscious of the state in respect of that information

Commentary on David M. Rosenthal (2000). Consciousness, content, and metacognitive judgments.Consciousness and Cognition, 9(2), 203–214. This article is part of a special issue of this journal onMetacognition and Consciousness, with Thomas O. Nelson and Georges Rey as Guest Editors.

2201053-8100/00 $35.00Copyright 2000 by Academic PressAll rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

COMMENTARY 221

itself’’ (italics in original), and he goes on to say, ‘‘I can be metacognitively awareof a state that is not itself a conscious state if I am aware of that state but not of itsspecific information content.’’ This seems perilously close to Hart’s early view ofFOK (e.g., Hart, 1965, 1967) in which Hart believed that we are somehow aware ofthe underlying state in which the sought-after information resided (as in being awareof ‘‘the envelope’’ in the Academy Awards without knowing the contents of theenvelope). However, Hart’s view has been rejected by most current psychologists(e.g., the ‘‘no-magic hypothesis’’ in Nelson & Narens, 1990, is a direct denial of it),with the current psychological literature focusing instead on the view that the FOKis an inference (not a direct awareness of an underlying state) that the person couldremember the currently nonretrieved information. The inference is conceptualized asstemming out of an awareness of retrieved information such as TOT and/or on therecognition of the stimulus cue as having been encountered before. For example, theperson might recognize having previously learned ‘‘the capital of Finland’’ in a worldgeography class, and on that basis might infer the possibility of being able to recog-nize the name of the capital from a set of names of Scandinavian cities. This viewhas been elaborated elsewhere (e.g., Koriat, 1993; also see Metcalfe, Schwartz, &Joaquim, 1993, and Reder & Ritter, 1992). Accordingly, I do not understand whatRosenthal has in mind when he writes, ‘‘If it subjectively seems that we are consciousof a state only by inference, that state is not a conscious state’’ (italics in original).This quotation is directly in conflict with the no-magic hypothesis (Nelson & Narens,1990), so it will be interesting to see what the resolution to that conflict turns out tobe.

I have related misgivings about Rosenthal’s subsequent remark that ‘‘It is notstrictly correct to say that feeling-of-knowing judgments ‘[do] not reflect any moni-toring of unconscious information.’ ’’ How does Rosenthal know it is not strictlycorrect? I am not aware of any compelling evidence to the contrary, but if Rosenthalis, I would like to know about it. Similarly, I would like to know the empirical evi-dence supporting his strong claim that ‘‘Making feeling-of-knowing judgments doesinvolve the monitoring of some unconscious informational states.’’ How does heknow this, and what would it mean to be wrong in that claim—i.e., how in principlecould the claim be disconfirmed? This would seem to be an important question, ifwe are to make scientific progress on these ideas.

Object-Level vs Meta-level

Rosenthal writes, ‘‘. . . does not, as Nelson assumes, imply that ‘the meta-levelis in some sense separable from the object-level it refers to.’ ’’ Why not? What Rosen-thal writes subsequently in the same paragraph about ‘‘a state gets sorted into themeta-level with respect to some other level just in case the state is about anotherstate that belongs to that other level. No additional separation need occur.’’ I wouldlike to know what ‘‘additional separation’’ Rosenthal has in mind that he is claimingto disagree with.

Reliability vs Validity

Rosenthal writes, ‘‘Subjects often are not reliable about . . .’’ (italics added). Iwish merely to point out that ‘‘reliability’’ seems to have a different meaning in

222 THOMAS O. NELSON

the philosophical literature than in the psychological literature. In the psychologicalliterature, it refers to repeatability; that is, a judgment is reliable if the same outcomerecurs across repeated queries about a given item, regardless of whether that judgmentis valid about what is being judged. A nice example is a perceptual illusion. A personobserving two horizontal lines of the same length may reliably judge the upper lineto be longer than the lower line (e.g., if arrowheads of opposite direction occur onthe two lines, as in the Mueller–Lyer illusion, or if converging diagonal lines sur-round the two horizontal lines, as in the Ponzo illusion). The philosophical use of‘‘reliability’’ is perhaps more similar to what psychologists would refer to as ‘‘valid-ity’’ (e.g., the aforementioned judgment of the relative lengths of the two horizontallines is reliable but not valid). The distinction is important for metacognition, becausemetacognitive judgments are typically reliable but often are not valid (e.g., Nelson,Leonesio, Landwehr, & Narens, 1986).

Likelihood of Other Explanatory Models Accommodating Particular Findings

Rosenthal closes his article by claiming, ‘‘It is unlikely that any other explanatorymodel can accommodate these disparities . . .’’ This seems to me to be a theoremfor which no proof is given. How can we know whether future explanatory modelsthat have not yet been invented will or will not be able to accommodate any currentlyknown outcomes? I suppose it may be ok as a statement of faith on Rosenthal’s part,but I hope he is wrong.

ONE MAJOR ITEM

I enjoyed most of Rosenthal’s article. However, the one thing that I was disap-pointed in is that we are not given any idea of what he means by consciousness perse. That is, his article seems to be focussed on self-consciousness (unquestionablyan important problem!), and his formulation of it may be summarized in his remarkthat ‘‘a state is conscious on the HOT model only if one is conscious of that stateindependently of any inference.’’ But what does he mean in that quotation when hewrites ‘‘one is conscious’’ at all?

Put differently, in the metacognitive literature, we refer to the information that onestate (say, the meta-level) has about another state (say, the object-level) in terms ofthe former monitoring the latter (e.g., Nelson & Naren, 1990). In this way, I thinkthat Rosenthal’s view and the view in the metacognitive literature are quite similar.But is there a difference between one state’s being conscious of another state vs onestate’s ‘‘monitoring’’ another state? I was hoping Rosenthal would tell us more aboutwhat the consciousness is that he proposes to be involved in self-consciousness.Things such as qualia and/or what it means to be conscious of anything at all aremissing, but perhaps to expect Rosenthal to tell us about them is expecting too much.However, it is what I hope we will eventually see as a result of philosophers addingtheir thoughts to the thoughts of psychologists who are doing research on metacogni-tion, and perhaps someday we will get to that point. Rosenthal’s article does, I be-lieve, take us in the right direction.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several of the ideas presented in this article were also presented at the Third Annual Conference ofthe Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (June 5, 1999). I thank David Rosenthal, mycosymposiast on that occasion, for his stimulating ideas and reactions. Preparation of this article waspartially supported by NIMH Grant K05-MH1075 (Career Development Award).

REFERENCES

Blake, M. (1973). Prediction of recognition when recall fails: Exploring the feeling-of-knowing phenom-enon. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12(3), 311–319.

Hart, J. T. (1965). Memory and the feeling-of-knowing experience. Journal of Educational Psychology,56(4), 208–216.

Hart, J. T. (1967). Memory and the memory-monitoring process. Journal of Verbal Learning and VerbalBehavior, 6, 685–691.

Koriat, A. (1993). How do we know that we know? The accessibility model of the feeling of knowing.Psychological Review, 100, 609–639.

Metcalfe, J., Schwartz, B. L., & Joaquim, S. G. (1993). The cue-familiarity heuristic in metacognition.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 19, 851–861.

Nelson, T. O., Leonesio, R. J., Landwehr, R., & Narens, L. (1986). A comparison of three predictorsof an individual’s memory performance: The individual’s feeling of knowing versus the normativefeeling of knowing versus base-rate item difficulty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,Memory, and Cognition, 12, 279–287.

Nelson, T. O. (1992). Metacognition: Core readings. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Nelson, T. O., & Narens, L. (1990). Metamemory: A theoretical framework and some new findings. InG. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation, Vol. 26, pp. 125–173. San Diego:Academic Press.

Reder, L. M., & Ritter, F. E. (1992). What determines initial feeling of knowing? Familiarity withquestion terms, not with the answer. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, andCognition, 18, 435–451.