The Representational Structure of Feelings

The Representational Structure of FeelingsJoëlle Proust

The word “feeling” denotes a reactive, subjective experience with a distinctive em-bodied phenomenal quality. Several types of feelings are usually distinguished,such as bodily, agentive, affective, and metacognitive feelings. The hypothesis de-veloped in this article is that all feelings are represented in a specialized,non-conceptual “expressive” mode, whose function is evaluative and action-guid-ing. Feelings, it is claimed, are conceptually impenetrable. Against a two-factortheory of feelings, it is argued, in the cases of affective and metacognitive feel-ings, that background beliefs can circumvent feelings in gaining the control of ac-tion, but cannot fully suppress them or their motivational potential.

KeywordsAffective feelings | Affordance | Agentive feelings | Appraisal | Arousal | Bodilyfeelings | Comparator | Control | Cues | Evaluative | Expressive | Familiarity |Fluency | Formal object | Illusory feeling | Incidental feelings | Integral feelings |Intensity | Metacognitive or noetic feelings | Monitoring | Nonconceptual con-tent | Predictive | Reactive | Resonance | Retrospective | Somatic marker | Trans-parency | Two-factor account | Valence

Author

Joëlle [email protected]

Ecole Normale SupérieureParis, France

Commentator

Iuliia [email protected]

Johannes Gutenberg-UnversitätMainz, Germany

Editors

Thomas [email protected]

Johannes Gutenberg-UniversitätMainz, Germany

Jennifer M. [email protected]

Monash UniversityMelbourne, Australia

Proust, J. (2015). The Representational Structure of Feelings.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 31(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570047 1 | 26

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1 Introduction

“Feeling” denotes a reactive, subjective experi-ence with a distinctive embodied phenomenalquality and a formal object, which may or maynot coincide with embodied experience. Feelingstypically express affect and valence in sensation.“Reactive” means that feelings are closely asso-ciated with an appraisal of a present propertyor event. The term “reactive” is crucial. Theterm “feeling” is sometimes used to refer to anon-reactive, perceptual experience. For ex-ample, when one perceives an object throughtouch, it is common to say that “one feels one’skey in one’s pocket”. But “feeling”, in this con-text, does not refer to a reactive phenomenon.It rather refers to the feedback of one’s ownkey-touching activity. This type of perceptualfeeling is expected to result from one’s actionand, hence, does not belong to the domain of re-

active feelings. What is called the “formal ob-ject” (see Kenny 1963) of a feeling is the prop-erty in the triggering event that elicits the re-active feeling. For example, the formal object offear is some threatening property detected inthe perceptual field.

Feelings can be pleasant or aversive,strong or weak, short-lived or long-lasting, orhave an arousing or depressing character. Theymotivate distinctive dispositions to act, whoseurgency is entailed both by the feeling experi-ence and the context in which it is experienced:feeling an intense pain disposes the person topromptly locate and remove the cause of thepain; except, for example, when it is self-inflic-ted, or when it is part of a ritual.

Most theorists of feelings agree that theyare associated with—or, for those who identify


Glossary

Feeling “Feeling” denotes a reactive, subjective experience with a distinctive embodied phenomenal quality and a formal object, which may or may not coincide with theembodied experience. Feelings typically express affect and valence in sensation.

Reactive “Reactive” means that feelings are closely associated with an appraisal of a present property or event.

Formal object “Formal object” of a feeling is the property in the triggering event that elicits thereactive feeling.

Metacognitive feelings Metacognitive feeling are experienced while conducting a cognitive task: the agentmay find the task easy or difficult, anticipate her ability or inability to conduct it. Once the task is completed, the agent may have the feeling of being right, or have a feeling of uncertainty about the outcome of her endeavour.

Affordance Affordances are positive or negative opportunities, expressed in feelings: an af-fordance-sensing swiftly and non-reflectively motivates the agent to act in a par-ticular way.

FS Affordance FS Affordancea [Placea=here], [Timea=Now/soon], [Valencea=+], [Intensitya=.8 (comparatively specified on a scale 0 to 1)], [motivation to act of degreed accord-ing to action programa].

Transparency A mental state is transparent if, when it is activated, its intentional content is ac-cessible to the subject who entertains it.

Incidental and integral feeling Metacognive feelings are called “incidental” when they are not based on valid cues about the cognitive task at hand, and hence, have no predictive value. They are called “integral” when they actually carry information about cognitive out-come.


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emotions with conscious experiences1 consist of—specialized, internally generated bodily sensa-tions, such as an increase in heart rate, contrac-tions or relaxations of the facial muscles, vis-ceral impressions, tremors or tears, impulses torun away, etc. As will be seen below, some feel-ings, however, do not express emotions., i.e.,they are not affective. A feeling tends to bemore explicitly felt as bodily when it has abody-related function; that is, the phenomeno-logy makes the need to be served salient (feelingtired, feeling a pain in the joints) in order tomotivate action. In affective feelings, in con-trast, the bodily phenomenology tends to recedeto the fringe of consciousness (feeling in lovewith A, feeling angry with B).2 From this obser-vation, it is easy to infer that types of feelingsdiffer in their respective meanings: they in somesense express what they are about. In affectivefeelings, an experience of “feeling toward” issupposedly present: the emotion is felt as beingabout an object, a person, or a situation—theobjects, rather than bodily sensations, are thefocus of one’s emotional attention. Affectivefeelings also include mixed cases where oneseems to both experience a strong bodily feelingat the same time as the intentional content thatthis feeling seems to refer to, as when MarcelProust’s narrator reports experiencing an acutepain in the chest when thinking about his be-loved deceased friend, Madame de Guermantes.3It is unclear whether metacognitive (also callednoetic, or epistemic) feelings are affective ornon-affective (see section 7 below). They are ex-perienced while conducting a cognitive task: theagent may find the task easy or difficult, andmay anticipate her ability or inability to con-duct it. Once the task is completed, the agentmay have the feeling of being right, or mayhave a feeling of uncertainty about the outcomeof her endeavour. Take the case of a person who

1 From the viewpoint of the somatic feeling theory of emotions, emo-tions can be explained as a somatic change caused by the perception,real or simulated, of a particular object. See James (1884, p. 190),and Damasio (1994, 2003). Other theorists of emotion, however, con-sider that the conscious experience of having an emotion includespropositional attitudes, and not only feelings. See sections 4 and 5below. Moods are long-term affective states, and will not concern ushere.

2 On this concept, see Mangan (1993, 2000) and Reber et al. (2002).3 See the analysis of this example in Goldie (2002), p. 56.

feels unable, presently, to remember what shehad for dinner last night. Her feeling of not re-membering is correlated with activity in a facialmuscle, the corrugator supercilii (Stepper &Strack 1993). Her feeling, however, is not abouther disposition to contract or relax this or thatmuscle, of which she is certainly unaware. It is,rather, about her present disposition to remem-ber what she had for dinner. Epistemic feelingsseem to be “feeling-toward” experiences, andhave cognitive dispositions or contents as theirobject.

Descriptive phenomenology, however, doesnot offer in itself an account of the intentionalstructure of feelings. We need to understandhow feelings in general gain their real or sup-posed aboutness, and how they relate to ac-tion-guidance as a function of context; i.e., weneed to provide a functional analysis of feelings.Section 2 will begin to provide such an analysis,and will address a preliminary issue—namely,Do the phenomena that are usually called “feel-ings” share a property that makes them a nat-ural kind? In section 3, the specific informa-tional structure of feelings will be seen to ac-count for their generic characteristics. Section 4will clarify the account by way of addressingvarious objections. Section 5 will attempt toshow that the proposed account fares betterwith experimental evidence than a cognitivistaccount of affective and metacognitive feelings.Section 6 will examine whether or not metacog-nitive feelings have an affective valence.

2 Are feelings a natural kind?

Paul Griffiths has claimed that emotions donot constitute a natural kind, in the sense thatthey do not form “a category about which wecan make inductive scientific discoveries”(2004, pp. 901–911). One can agree with latterclaim, however, without concluding that feel-ings do not constitute a natural kind. First,feelings are not only affective ingredients inemotional awareness. Some feelings, such asfeeling cold or sick, or feeling that one is act-ing, have nothing to do with affective episodes.Second, there are evolutionary reasons to dis-tinguish, within emotions, two classes of sub-




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jective appraisals. Emotion theorists usuallycontrast feelings expressed in primary emotions—fear, anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, anddisgust—with various appraisals cum conativedispositions associated with higher cognitiveemotions, such as envy, guilt, pride, shame,loyalty, vengefulness, and regret. The first arephylogenetically and ontogenetically prior tocognitions. They belong to the ancient limbicsystem, which is present in some form in mostanimals. A quick route from the retinal imageto the amygdala through the thalamus allowsaffective information to control behavior (seeLeDoux 1996). Primary feelings are thustriggered independently of concept possessionand motivate specific responses. Secondary af-fective experiences, in contrast, might haveevolved on the basis of social constraints in re-lation to cooperative action among humans. In-deed (with the possible exception of pride andshame) they are not present in nonhumanprimates.4 They activate newer brain struc-tures; they require concept possession, dependon background beliefs, and do not generatecharacteristic behaviors. Finally, primary feel-ings are clearly embodied, while secondaryemotions seem to have no proprietary somaticmarkers. An interesting idea, suggested byJesse Prinz (2004, p. 95), is that the facial orsomatic correlate of secondary emotions, whenthey have one, involves a blend of the somaticmarkers for primary feelings.

In summary: emotions differ, among otherthings, because of the unequal role that feelingshave in the two classes of emotions just dis-cussed. The wider scope of feelings, when under-stood as “reactive, subjective experiences with adistinctive embodied phenomenal quality”,seems to be more unified than emotions, andmaking feelings seem like plausible candidatesfor a natural kind.

We need, however, to turn this tentativedefinition into a general functional characteriza-tion that presumably holds for all feelings (bey-ond affective ones) and only for them. Here is aproposal: feelings constitute the sensitive part ofpredictive and retrospective processes of4 On this contrast, see Frank (1988), Griffiths (1997), and Prinz (2004,

pp. 82-83). On whether they qualify as emotions, see Ekman (1992).

non-conceptual evaluation of one’s own andothers’ well-being and actions. Being essentiallyevaluative, feelings are always the output of acomparator: in other terms, they are crucialmonitoring ingredients in self-regulated adapt-ive control systems. In such systems, the spe-cific function of a feeling consists in detectinghow much a current observed value of a para-meter deviates from its expected value, on oneor several dimensions relevant to survival (seeCarver & Scheier 2001). Their formal object,when they have one,5 (such as being afraid ofthe bear in front of me) cannot be analyzed in-dependently of the monitoring function theyserve within a specialized control loop.6 Relev-ance to well-being, however, extends to bodilycondition, goal achievement, and availability ofpreferred goods of all kinds (food, partner, so-cial status). The relevant dimensions of vari-ation that feelings track may accordingly be ofa sensory, proprioceptive kind (feeling thirsty,cold, etc.), social-affective (feeling angry), oragentive (goal-related). Goal achievement, how-ever, involves either epistemic or instrumentalsuccess, respectively generating epistemic feel-ings (feeling interested, bored, epistemically un-certain) and agentive feelings (feeling of happi-ness, of agentive confidence, of ownership ofone’s action, etc.). Feelings, in summary, arethe outcomes of comparators in a control loop;they carry non-conceptual information abouthow much one’s present condition deviates fromthe expected condition. From a functional view-point, they form a natural kind insofar as theirfunction is to indicate a comparative outcomethrough a dedicated embodied experience.

Note, however, that there are comparatorsthat trigger no feelings at all: these non-sensit-ive comparators may either work outside con-sciousness (for example, error signals drivingimmediate correction7, not to mention compar-ators that work at the cell level), or they cantake concepts as their input, rather than react-

5 As observed by Goldie (2009), some feelings, for example, [feelinganxious] or [feeling depressed], seem to lack a formal object, which istypically the case with moods. As indicated above, moods will not bediscussed in this article.

6 Bechara et al. (2000) make it clear that the somatic marker theoryapplies to action, whether it engages affects or not.

7 see Logan & Crump 2010 and Nieuwenhuis et al. 2001




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ing to percepts or situations (for example com-parators of currency or of educational value).

As far as feelings are concerned, they aredirectly related to a presently-perceived context(or an imagined or remembered context, but ina “present-like”, indexical mode): one can feeltoo hot, too cold, or too tired (or feel “OK”,which usually means a tolerable deviation fromthe expected value). One can feel the fright onehas had, even after the frightening event hasended. The outcome of a feeling-based ap-praisal, from a functional viewpoint, has to con-sist in some disposition to act that is adaptive,relative to the input to which the feeling is a re-action. Granting that feelings, as sensitive com-parators in a control system, form a naturalkind, there should be common properties cut-ting across the various types listed above. Infact we find three types of functional relationsbetween feelings of a given kind and the associ-ated disposition to act. First, feelings, accordingto their embodied valence, typically determineactions of approach or of avoidance. Some dic-tate caution, others boldness. Some encourageself-restraint, others self-assertion. Fear pro-motes a flight tendency, hunger a tendency toapproach food. Second, they have a specific ori-entation in time: some feelings have a predictivefunction, and thus induce a behavior that isbased on contingencies to be further displayedin the present context. For example, fear, whendirected at a possible danger, increases thereadiness to flee in case the danger concretizes.Others have a retrospective function, and in-duce corrections to the commands one has pre-viously used, or to one’s previous preferences.For example, feeling nauseous after food inges-tion induces food avoidance, i.e., a change inthe agent’s preferences. In contrast, feeling dis-gust at the sight of some food may prevent theagent from approaching it. A subset of feelings,such as feeling happy, have both temporal ori-entations. Third, according to their embodieddynamics and intensity (which is called their“level of arousal”), feelings can provoke an elev-ation in the energy available to the system:they provoke excitement, agitation, power inthe coming response; or, on the contrary, they

may have a soothing effect and diminish thetendency to act.

One major functional property of feelings,from the viewpoint of information extractionand use, is that they can very rapidly extractand synthesize multiple cues from perception.This rapidity is a consequence of the automaticand encapsulated character of the control mech-anism whose output they express. Feelings areautomatically triggered by a specific type of in-put (which is the definition of informational en-capsulation).8 Automaticity is associated withfeelings being inescapable, at least for thosefeelings that have been allowed to developwithin a culture, granting normal development.9The mechanism that generates somatic, noetic,or affective feelings from inputs (perceptual,imaginative, or memorial) does not require oneto have specific beliefs or intentions.10 Informa-tional encapsulation explains why transitivefeelings persist when the agent finds out thatthe situation is different from what she thoughtto be the case. Just as an optical illusion suchas the Müller-Lyer effect does not immediatelydissipate when it turns out that the segmentsare equal, a feeling of anger does not disappearas soon as the agent realizes that its formal ob-ject is not exemplified.

Automaticity and informational encapsu-lation seem also to characterize agentive feel-ings (see Pacherie 2008). Feelings generated inthe course of a physical action come in twovarieties: generalized or specialized. Some, suchas feelings of agency, of initiation of action, ofownership and of motor control, are indicatorsmonitoring action in progress: they concern“who” is performing the action, and “how” theaction is being conducted (see Proust 2000).Others concern the evaluation of an action inone’s own repertoire: a professional carpenteror an experienced musician, for example, havefeelings telling them if an action sequence(whether their own or another agent’s) in this8 Automaticity in appraisal is central to Ekman’s analysis of

primary emotions (1992). See also Griffiths (1997), Prinz(2004), and Zajonc (1980). On informational encapsulation, seeFodor (1983).

9 For example, fearlessness in the presence of danger may result froma disturbed childhood.

10 Some affective feelings, however, can be intentionally controlled inthe long run, through cultural learning. See Murata et al. (2013).




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repertoire sounds or looks right, even beforethey identify why they have this feeling. Thesefeelings are also the outputs of a comparisonbetween motor anticipations and observedproperties of the action (a “forward model ofaction” supposedly stores the expected valuesof crucial parameters; Wolpert et al. 2001).They can predict the likelihood of completingan action (when the question arises, in difficultor non-routine cases), or evaluate—on-line orin retrospect—how swiftly, effortlessly, or un-hesitatingly an action was performed. Agentivefeelings thus have an essential role in regulat-ing the fundamental properties of physical ac-tions, such as the quality of the outcome,11 andthe ownership of the action.12

Noetic feelings, finally, are functionallysimilar to somatic, affective, and agentive feel-ings—although their evolutionary pattern seemsto be different from the other three kinds.While most organisms have proprioceptive, af-fective, and motor control, and hence, presum-ably, somatic, affective, and agentive feelings,few are able to control their cognitive decisionsthrough metacognitive feelings (see Beran et al.2012 and Proust 2013). The latter are generatedwhen trying to perceive, to remember, or toplan a cognitive task (in particular, when tryingto plan how long to study material in order tomaster it).13 They are also relied upon whentrying to reason or to solve a problem; whenconversing, feelings of effort, and of informative-ness, are monitored by speakers and hearers inorder to maintain a common level of relevance.Like other feelings, they have two distinctivetemporal orientations. Some have a predictivefunction. A feeling of knowing (FOK) may arisewhen trying to remember an item—for examplea proper name—that one has not yet retrieved:having a strong FOK reliably predicts that onewill finally retrieve the searched content (Koriat& Levy-Sadot 2001). A feeling of having a nameon the tip of one’s tongue (TOT) both signals11 Non-conscious error signals can also guide corrective steps, without

the agent noticing them. 12 Pat Haggard et al. (2002) have demonstrated the crucial role of the

temporal binding between felt initiation of action and output in thesense of being the agent of an action. See, among other articles, Hag-gard et al. (2002).

13 This prediction involves judgments of learning (JOL). See Koriat &Ackerman (2010).

the fact that a word is not presently available,and, according to its onset, valence, and intens-ity, whether it is worth or not worth pursuingone’s effort to retrieve it (see Brown 1991 andSchwartz et al. 2000). Feelings of fluency arethe sense of ease of processing one may feel orfail to feel when attempting to perceptually dis-criminate objects with a given property, or toretrieve items from episodic or semanticmemory. A feeling of familiarity is particularlysalient, in human adults, when no further factabout the target can be retrieved. It offers use-ful information about the epistemic status ofthe target: that it is not new, but neverthelessnot fully recognized. A feeling of familiarity,then, motivates, among others, an attempt torecognize what or who a target is. Other meta-cognitive feelings have a retrospective function.When a name is retrieved, a feeling of rightness(FOR) motivates the agent to consider her re-sponse the expected one.14 Various feelings ofuncertainty, based on fluency, coherence, plaus-ibility, informativeness, or relevance, also haveretrospective functions: their valence and in-tensity tell the agent whether she should acceptor reject a cognitive outcome. These parametersare expressed through specialized somatic mark-ers, such as increased activity in the facialmuscle involved in smiling, the zygomaticusmajor—for positive valence—or the corrugatorsupercilli (involved in frowning)—for negativevalence (Winkielman & Cacioppo 2001).

Taken together, these considerations arecompatible with the view that somatic, agent-ive, metacognitive, and “primary” affective feel-ings, even if they differ in their formal objects,form a natural kind. Our attempt above at afunctional characterization focused on the gen-eral relations of feelings to inputs, outputs, andmediating evaluative mechanisms. From thischaracterization, it emerges that feelings aregradients in comparators that are felt subject-ively, rather than being propositional states de-scribable in analytic, objective terms. These ob-servations, however, suggest that, in order toexpress a specialized and fine-tuned reactivityto one or several formal objects, and to motiv-

14 On FORs, see Thompson et al. (2011).




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ate adapted behaviors, in order to be re-membered and conveyed to others feelings musthave their own representational format. Wenow turn to the following question: What is thestructure of the information that is extractedand expressed in a feeling?

3 What kind of information do feelings express?

The above question is important for clarifyingthe relation of feelings both to their formal ob-ject, when they have one, and to the action thatthey motivate. In the case of metacognitive feel-ings (M-feelings), the difficulty is particularlypregnant: it stems from the fact that, if wegrant that M-feelings do not require conceptpossession to be felt, then it is unclear howtheir formal object should be construed: Whatare they about? Let us take a feeling of uncer-tainty, felt while trying to remember a propername. Is this feeling about a memory state, orabout a disposition to retrieve a proper name?If a feeling is about a memorial state or a dis-position, its intentional content needs to includeconcepts of memory, of correctness, and of un-certainty. Empirical evidence, however, demon-strates that animals with no mindreading abil-ity, and hence that are deprived of concepts ofperception or of memory, are able to monitortheir perception and memory as reliably as hu-mans do.15 Furthermore, human children, fromearly on, are sensitive to the contrast betweenfamiliar and unfamiliar faces and environments.This supports our claim above: one can feel coldor anxious or uncertain without having the cor-responding concepts of those feelings. A propos-itional format does not seem to apply to feelingsin general.16

How do feelings fulfill their particular em-bodied, subjective way of representing—a modewe will call the “expressive mode”? The broadlyfunctional characterization given above provides

15 Rhesus monkeys have been found to opt out of more or less challen-ging perceptual or memory trials as a result of trial difficulty. For asummary of the results and a methodological discussion of their sig-nificance, see Beran et al. (2012), Chapter 1, and Proust (2013),Chapter 5.

16 For a defense of emotional representations as nonconceptual and ac-tion oriented, see Griffiths & Scarantino (2009).

useful clues. Expressive representations com-prise exclusively non-conceptual, perceptual,and evaluative (gradient- and valence-based)elements, which taken together express a sub-jective relation to the environment (internal orexternal) and a given tendency to act. It shouldbe emphasized, however, that adult humans canobviously entertain simultaneously expressiveand conceptual representations. The present hy-pothesis, in conformity with the literature ondual-processing, is that the expressive systemprocesses information and influences decisionson the basis of its own narrow range of associ-ations and norms; while the conceptual systemtakes advantage of background beliefs and infer-ential reasoning to make decisions in light of abroader set of norms. Let us take the case of anagent feeling joy after having won the lottery. Ahuman adult normally has [lottery] in her con-ceptual repertoire, along with some of the infer-ences that can be made on its basis. However,the agent’s reactivity to the winning event fallsunder the expressive mode of representation,because this is the mode in which evaluation ofthe opportunities is conducted. This feeling rep-resentation presumably enlightens and orientsthe concept-based reasoning that can be con-ducted concerning the same event, such as won-dering how to spend the money, or whetherquitting her job is a good idea. We propose tocall “affordance-sensing” the information that afeeling expresses. Affordances are positive ornegative opportunities, expressed in feelings: anaffordance-sensing swiftly and non-reflectivelymotivates the agent to act in a particular way.Departing somewhat from Gibson’s use of thisterm within his ecological theory of perception,“affordance” is used here to refer to a non-con-ceptual and entirely subjective appraisal of theenvironment by the agent: an affordance is aperceived utility, which can be positive (some-thing to approach and grasp) or negative(something to avoid and from which to flee).17

The corresponding representation has anindexical structure, because it has an essential17 See Proust (2009, 2013). Prinz (2004) briefly discusses this idea in

connection with the intentional content of emotions (p. 228). Seealso Griffiths & Scarantino (2009): in emotion, “the environment isrepresented in terms of what it affords to the emoter in the way ofskillful engagement with it.”




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relation to an occurrent represented property.Indexicality, however, has to be understoodhere in a non-referential sense. What is indexedis an occurrent (relational) affordance, ratherthan an individual event or object. Here is ourproposal for what a given feeling structure (FS)looks like:

• FS Affordancea [Placea=here],[Timea=now/soon], [Valencea=+], [Intensitya=.8

(comparatively specified on a scale 0 to 1)],[motivation to act of degreed according to ac-tion programa].

The subscript “a” is meant to indicate that allthe elements that have this subscript are rep-resentational cues, i.e., ingredients, in presentaffordance-sensing a. Note that the strength(or degree) of the motivation to act does notdepend only on the fitness significance, i.e., onthe valence and intensity of the affordance.Other factors, such as the physical conditionof the agent and her prior arousal level (hermood) also modulate her motivational level(Schwarz & Clore 2007). The specification ofthe location of the affordance may vary, de-pending on the way the feeling was generated,but indexicality and reactivity suggest thatthe relevant affordance is often sensed to oc-cur where the feeling is experienced. As willbe seen later, however, M-feelings do not in-volve a specification of place.

The feeling structure proposed above in-cludes somatic markers, even if they are notmade explicit: these markers are the sub-strates for the information of valence and in-tensity. This information is carried by neuralactivations and associated bodily changes,such as a sudden sensation of pleasant musclerelaxation, or of unpleasant muscle contrac-tion, or of visceral contractions associatedwith fear. Intensity of affordance, i.e., thearousal produced by a feeling, is also feltthrough the comparative amount of bodily re-activity to the affordance. These somaticmarkers, as emphasized above, are themselvespart of a monitoring system designed to pre-dict and assess one’s relations to the environ-ment along the relevant dimensions listed

above (agency, individual and social well-be-ing, preferences, and metacognition).

Let us consider further how to read thefeeling structure given above. It is meant to re-flect not only what is presently felt, but alsowhat is stored in memory when a feeling is ex-perienced, what can be imagined, and what canbe conveyed to others in expressive behavior.The central idea is that feelings sensitively ex-press a subjective, embodied relation to an op-portunity in an input from the environment(understood in a broad sense as including ex-ternal and bodily properties relevant to well-be-ing). This primitive intentional relation is bestcaptured by the term affordance-sensing. Feel-ings express this affordance as their focus (orformal object), along with its graded valence—ranging from very unpleasant to very pleasant—and with its intensity gradient, which rangesfrom small to large.18

As often emphasized, reactivity to an af-fordance occurs very rapidly in a processing se-quence—even before the perceptual processinghas been completed—and well before a con-cept-based judgment can be made (see Dolan2002, p. 1191; Griffiths 1997, pp. 77; LeDoux1996, pp. 174; Prinz 2004, pp. 60, and Zajonc1980, pp. 153). This suggests that an alternat-ive, evaluative informational system screens theinput with its own independent memorial struc-tures.19

An affordance does not need to have anobjective counterpart to be sensed, i.e., for afeeling to arise: it is enough that the agent anti-cipates it (even wrongly), imagines it, or re-members it, for the corresponding feeling to beexpressed. A feeling, thus, does not presuppose

18 For a review of the theories of valence, see Prinz (2004), Ch. 7. Prinztakes valence to be a different determinate experience in each feeling.On valence as determined by overall value, from a consumer se-mantics viewpoint, rather than as an experience of pleasure/displeas-ure, see Carruthers (2011), pp. 127–130. This view, however, doesnot build on the nonconceptual information being felt, but rather onits being represented “in an abstract and amodal way”, which, never-theless, is motivating.

19 These expressive representations do not require a system tohave the capacity to form propositional representations. Theyare close to what Strawson called “a featural representationalsystem”, allowing an animal to navigate with no propositionalthinking (1959). On the comparison between the two represent-ational modes, see Proust (2013). The question of the penetrab-ility of feelings by propositional thought is explored below, insection 5.




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a conceptual appraisal of the context, butrather it indexes in an embodied way a directevaluative registration. Given that an afford-ance does not aim at characterizing the world,one cannot say, when the expressed affordancehas no objective counterpart, that a feeling“misrepresents” the world as having a given af-fordance, or reciprocally that an existing afford-ance was “missed” by the agent when the latterfailed to detect it. For misrepresentation to oc-cur, a system must be equipped to attributeproperties to individual objects, that is, it mustbe able to apply concepts. The expressive sys-tem, however, does not refer to objects as inde-pendent entities. Hence, affordance is not liter-ally what a feeling is about, because aboutnesspresupposes that what is represented is inde-pendent from the representational system. Be-ing relational, affordances cannot be grasped in-dependently of the experience of a sensitiveagent. When saying that a feeling “expresses”an affordance, we mean that it “resonates” to it(or that it monitors it). Resonance is a neur-al-somatic reactivity: it carries indexical andevaluative information, but it does not refer tothe world or attempt to describe it.

It is possible, however, to objectively char-acterize what a feeling functionally refers to,and to pinpoint cases of misrepresentation, byre-describing the feeling structure above innon-subjective, non-evaluative propositionalterms. Taking advantage of her perceptual andbackground beliefs, the agent can claim to havemistaken a piece of wood for a snake, for ex-ample, and to make explicit that there is noreason to be afraid of a piece of wood.

Our analysis of FS helps us to clarify why“feeling one’s keys in one’s pocket” does not be-long to reactive feelings. Recognizing throughtouch the object in one’s pocket as being one’skeys, or merely having a proprioceptive experi-ence in fact caused by one’s keys, are two waysof perceiving one’s keys, involving respectivelycognitive and sensory proprioception. Butneither needs as such to involve an affordanceof a given intensity and valence. In contrast, letus suppose that the perceiver believes wronglythat she has forgotten her home keys, which arein some distant location, and will not be able to

get back home. Feeling her keys in her pocketimmediately triggers a positive affordance,opening up the field of possible actions.

4 Questions and objections

The present proposal raises a number of addi-tional questions and objections. Let us startwith the most radical objection.

4.1 Are feelings representations?

Granting that feelings, affective or not, can bepure “physical effects of objects on the nerves”,in William James’ terms (1890, vol. 2, p. 458),they do not need to have any genuine represent-ational value. James invites us to take the caseeither of purely somatic feelings or of objectlessemotions when they are generated by a patholo-gical condition—such as the precordial catchsyndrome (PCS) which is a feeling of pain inthe chest that usually goes away without treat-ment, but can lead the victim to think he or sheis suffering a heart attack. In this case, theemotional experience of dread, James says, is“nothing but the feeling of a bodily state, and ithas a purely bodily cause” (1890, vol. 2, p. 459).From this, one might conclude that a feeling isa merely peripheral phenomenon: it does nothave a function to represent, nor does it expressanything in particular. What can be said, in re-sponse, is, first, that feelings have a crucialevaluative function, which they perform thanksto their expressive structure. In PCS, the pa-tient’s experience of dread has valence and in-tensity, expressed through sudden breathless-ness, chest constriction, blurred vision, tinglingsensations in the skin, an elevated heart beat,and a disposition to crouch. These feelings arenot only a matter of sensory “peripheral” exper-ience: they are also used by the patient to col-lect her existing Bayesian correlations, and tomonitor with their help the present affordanceexpressed. A second illustration of the repres-entational nature of feelings is that they canarise in the absence of the sensory basis theyseem to have. For example, illusory feelings ofbeing touched—a reactive somatosensory feelingabout a change occurring on one’s body surface




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—can be created by manipulating the coherenceof the intermodal inputs from vision, touch, andproprioception. In the so-called “rubber-hand il-lusion”, participants feel that their hand is be-ing touched with a paint brush, when in fact itis an artificial hand, not theirs, that they seebeing touched. They also, after a while, “feel asif their (real) hand is turning ‘rubbery’” (seeBotvinick & Cohen 1998). This experiment isevidence that feelings are informational states,which monitor inputs, and, in extreme cases likethis, cause the brain to try to reconcile contra-dictory multimodal input. In the proposed in-terpretation, however, seeing one’s hand beingtouched is a reactive feeling, while activelytouching an object generates a percept—whichplays quite a different role in cognition.

4.2 What does “resonating to an affordance” mean?

Second, speaking of “subjective resonance” toan affordance (see the discussion of how a feel-ing “resonates” to an affordance in section 3above) may look improperly metaphorical.20This is meant, however, to mark the differencebetween feeling and perceiving. While perceptsallow recognition and identification of externalobjects and properties, feelings express specificaffordances in a perceived, imagined, or re-membered situation. For example, one can feelcold right now, or simulate being cold whenplanning a polar trip; one can remember howangry, or bored one was in a given episode andcontext. Feelings give agents prompt access tothe relevant features of a new situation throughsensed changes in their experience. Importantly,resonance is also an apt term for empathy, i.e.,for the propagation of feelings from an agent toan onlooker, based on expressive behavior (De-cety & Meyer 2008; Dezecache et al. 2013).Brain imagery suggests that the perception ofpain in another individual largely overlaps withthe regions activated when experiencing painoneself (Jackson et al. 2005). Such empathy, inthe present proposal, exemplifies how a feelingstructure can be communicated through a set of20 In a similar vein, William James writes that, in emotions, “the whole

organism is a sounding board” (1890, vol. 2, p. 450).

congruent behavioral cues associated with agiven affordance (here a painful stimulus), witha valence and intensity that are bodily con-veyed.

4.3 Non-conceptual content as a common feature of feelings and percepts

Third, one might object that a common featureof feelings and percepts is that they includenon-conceptual contents. This is true; but no-tice the difference between the two types ofnon-conceptual content: while non-conceptualingredients in perception are related to object-ive, external contrastive cues such as shapes,edges, colors, volumes, and auditory patterns,which can be static or dynamic, but are alwayspurely descriptive, non-conceptual contents infeelings only include evaluative states, whichcombine the general type of the affordance, itsvalence, its intensity, the proper action pro-gram, where all constituents are “bodilymarked”, i.e., expressed through somatic mark-ers. Therefore we cannot say that feelings “per-ceive” affordances, for this would suppose eitherthat feelings have direct sensory access to theworld—which they don’t, for they extract theirinputs from sensory perception—or that theyhave direct sensory access to the body, whichthey don’t have either—feelings are the subject-ive counterpart of bodily changes. Therefore wecannot say that agents “perceive affordances”when they experience a feeling, for this wouldsuppose either that feelings have a direct sens-ory access to the world, which they don’t, forthey extract their inputs from sensory percep-tion, or that they have direct sensory access tothe body, which they don’t have either. Feelingsare the subjective counterpart of bodilychanges.

Neuroscientific research about the role ofemotion in perception offers evidence in favor ofthis view. An affordance is made immediatelysalient by the system’s ability to sensitively re-act to a (half-)perceived element in a givenknown context.21 We speak of “half-perception”

21 For a defence of this view in terms of situated cognition, see Grif-fiths & Scarantino (2009). The authors emphasise the environmentalscaffolding that makes possible affordance detection in emoters.




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on the basis of what is known about the timingof object perception. Affordance predictions aremade only milliseconds after visual sensationsregister on the retina, i.e., before the categorisa-tion of perceived objects is completed (Barrett& Bar 2009). The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC;involved in emotion and reward in decisionmaking, thanks to projections from the thal-amus) is able to extract an affordance in thefirst 80ms of the visual process, merely on thebasis of low spatial frequency and magnocellularvisual input (Lamme & Roelfsema 2000). Whathappens to perceptual access when a perceivercannot extract affordances? Barrett & Bar(2009) have shown that the lack of emotionalreactivity in early perception impairs object cat-egorization. A patient who accidentally lost hisvisual ability when three years old received inadulthood a corneal transplant. In spite of hisrecovered ability to extract visual informationfrom the world, this perceiver had trouble cat-egorizing what he saw. The authors’ suggestionis that reconstituting the internal affective con-text associated with past exposures to an object(which was lacking in this particular case) is“one component of the prediction that helps aperson see the object in the first place” (Barrett& Bar 2009, p. 1325).

In summary: the medial OFC uses earlylow-level visual output to match the affordanceassociated with it in past experience of the ob-ject: somatic markers are thereby activated, andthe appropriate action is prepared. A FS en-ables an object to be more swiftly categorizedat higher perceptual levels. This evidence sug-gests that affordances are extracted from per-ception, but that feelings are not themselvesperceived.22 On the contrary, they offer a separ-ate kind of feedback to cognitive perceptualprocesses.

4.4 Respective role of somatic markers and formal content

Let us turn now to one of the most centralquestions that our proposal raises. How does itexplain the respective roles, in expressive inten-22 When we say that a feeling is felt, “felt” is not intended to mean

“perceived”, but, rather, “entertained”.

tional content, of somatic markers, on the onehand, and of the represented formal objects onthe other? Cognitive theorists take emotions torepresent both salient aspects of the agents’own bodily changes and an evaluative beliefabout an external fact, with, possibly, a causalrelation between this fact and the experiencedbodily change (see Gordon 1987; Tye 2008 andSolomon 2007). For example, when perceiving abear in the near vicinity, one’s experience istaken to be about a complex of subjective bod-ily impressions (a pounding heart, tremblinglegs, etc.) and about the perception of a bear asbeing the cause of these changes. Such a con-strual of the intentional content of feelings onlymakes sense within a propositional mode ofthought. Can our expressive mode reflect or ap-proximate the information contained in thiscomplex causal structure?

Clearly, FS does not explicitly convey acausal relation between situation, somaticmarkers and subjective feeling. It carries thiscausal relation implicitly, however, as a con-sequence of the control architecture that pro-duces feelings. In an emotional control loop, aperceived affordance causes (rather than beingrepresented as causing) its expressive evaluationthrough its specialized sensory feedback. Emo-tional awareness expresses this functional rela-tion. An external event (made accessiblethrough a perceived affordance, as detailedabove) is immediately followed by subjectivelyexperienced somatic cues of a given intensityand valence. In functional terms, this sequencemakes sense in the following way. When an as-sociated forward model has been selected (oftenautomatically, on the basis of an environmental,somatic, or cognitive affordance), the associatedsensory cues (the somatic markers in this par-ticular episode) are automatically activated inorder to monitor how this affordance is to beprocessed and reacted to. As has been shownelsewhere, monitoring implicitly carries informa-tion about the command (or the affordance)that is being monitored (see Proust 2013). Thisexplanation is particularly detailed and convin-cing in the case of motor representations of ac-tion; the feelings of agency that result from thecomparators associated with a given feedfor-




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ward model express (among others) whether theemoter is, or is not, the author of the actioncurrently attended to (see Wolpert et al. 2001and Pacherie 2008). The present proposal gener-alizes the functional significance of feelingsthroughout their diverse types (reviewed in sec-tion 2). As the outcome of sensory comparators,feelings always carry a structured informationset about the type of affordance they contributeto regulating, about its amount, and aboutwhich actions are appropriate. This informa-tion, in its own expressive mode, functionallyapproximates a causal relation that is, whenpropositionally expressed, represented as a rela-tion between an internal state, an externalcause, and a disposition to act.

In summary: Feelings do not gain theiraboutness through a propositional thoughtwhere the contrast between object and propertyis semantically marked; they gain their func-tional (rather than propositional) aboutness(f-aboutness) through the respective roles, inadaptive control, of the selection of an afford-ance-dependent control model and of the mark-ers that allow comparisons of valence and in-tensity to be expressed.

4.5 The attribution problem

This account, however, fails to explain observedvariability in the production of feelings and theinterpretation of what feelings are “about”.There are cases where agents misattribute theirsadness, their anger, or their happiness to anevent that is either not real, or that actuallyplayed no role in feeling production. How cansuch a misattribution be explained on thepresent proposal? Our first attempt to addressthis question is based on the subjective ground-ing of affordances. “Feeling f” normally meansthat an affordance is sensed, expressed, andsubjectively represented as present. This doesnot mean that the affordance has an objectivecounterpart. Thus a thirsty traveller can be de-lighted or relieved when subjected to a watermirage. It is no problem for this view, then, ifan event does not have the action potential fora given affordance it is expressed as having.

A trickier problem for the proposal isthat a person might feel an f-feeling while shethinks that she has a g-feeling. Is such a situ-ation even possible? To deal with this ques-tion, we must first clarify what“transparency” means when applied to feel-ings. A mental state is transparent if, when itis activated, its intentional content is access-ible to the subject who entertains it, while itsvehicle properties are not. On the view defen-ded above, feelings are transparent, becausetheir somatic markers are felt in connectionwith a certain affordance, and because theirvalence and intensity directly influence theemoter’s motivation to act in a given way.Such transparency, however, does not need toentail the subject’s ability to verbally reportthe content of her feeling. First, as seenabove, a feeling can be felt by a nonhuman orby a child, both of whom lack the requisiteverbal and conceptual capacities. Second, evenan agent endowed with language can expressthrough somatic markers a feeling with a dis-tinctive FS content while failing to accuratelyreport, in conceptual terms, what her feelingis “about”. We saw that [aboutness], i.e., ref-erence to an independent event or object, isnot a concept that belongs to FS. When sub-jects try to infer [aboutness] from their experi-ence, their propositional system of representa-tion (PS) is solicited. Because the latter hasan analytic rather than an evaluative func-tion, additional constraints step in. Whilenonconceptual, intensive (analog) and valueconsiderations and norms regulate FS, concep-tual, digital, and instrumental considerationsand norms regulate PS.23

Hence, when having to report about herfeelings, a subject needs to translate one modeof representation into another, with no guaran-tee that this translation will not enrich ormodify FS intentional content. First, she mayno longer have access to the rich diversity ofher FS experience, because her attention is nolonger directed toward the relevant contextu-ally-activated affordance. Second, she has tomonitor other goals and their corresponding (so-23 About the nature and role of nonconceptual norms, see Proust

(2013).




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cial, instrumental, or epistemic) norms. For ex-ample, she needs to present her feelings to her-self and to others in a socially acceptable way,and to try to justify them rationally. This inturn will depend on her existing background be-liefs, on her self-concept, on her capacity formaking self-attributions of this particular kind,and on her willingness to perform this kind ofintrospective report. A number of experimentsand novels have documented the wide gapbetween people’s feeling experiences and theverbal report they provide, or the reasons theyoffer, for having this or that feeling. These con-siderations suggest, then, that the issue oftransparency cannot be adjudicated independ-ently of one’s viewpoint about mental architec-ture.24 According to the present proposal, an af-fordance is first subjectively recognized throughthe resonance it produces—through its specificfeeling, rather than through a concept-based in-terpretation.

Let us now return to our earlier question.Can a person actually feel an f-like feeling, andmistake this f-feeling for a g-feeling? Accordingto the present account, this situation would pre-suppose that an f-feeling, as it occurs in the ex-pressive mode, is misdescribed in a verbal re-port as a g-feeling, to finally be genuinely felt tobe g. On this view, a change in representationalform would not only make it possible to reinter-pret the initial experience in terms of a differentone, but also to feel differently. To see whetherthis case is plausible, it is worth discussingSchachter and Singer’s (1962) adrenaline experi-ment.

24 An alternative proposal by Carruthers (2011) sees as a condition oftransparency of an affective feeling, rather, that the correspondingappraisal include the detection of the details of the associated non-conceptual somatic markers, which makes the recognition of a spe-cific emotion possible, as well as its subsequent global broadcast—hence making this information available to the mindreading system.This analytic view of feelings, however, makes it utterly mysterioushow a given pattern of autonomic measures is ever recognized,among thousands of similar patterns, as distinctive of an emotion.On the present view, a feeling is produced within a given forwardmodel, which automatically activates the comparator for this afford-ance. Transparency, then, is effective only when a given forwardmodel is activated, and does not need to transfer to a verbal modal-ity. This seems to be recognized in part by Peter Carruthers, whenhe concludes that “we can have transparent access to the strength ofonly our occurrent context-bound affective attitudes” (2011, p. 146).

5 Do beliefs influence affective report?

Schachter and Singer’s famous adrenaline studyaimed to collect evidence in favor of atwo-factor theory of emotion, according towhich a changed state of arousal leads agents toform feelings with a given valence that dependsonly on the epistemic/motivational context.Participants’ arousal was manipulated by in-jecting them, under pretext, with adrenaline ora placebo. Only a subgroup of the adrenalineparticipants were informed that they had re-ceived a drug that would modify their arousallevel. Participants were subsequently invited tostay in a waiting room where a confederate waseither pretending to be euphoric or angry. Par-ticipants’ emotional responses, observed in theirbehavior and subsequent self-report, differed inthe various conditions: those unaware of havingbeen injected with adrenaline, and placed in theanger condition, felt angriest, followed by theplacebo + anger subjects. The least angry werethe adrenaline informed participants. In the eu-phoria condition, misinformed adrenaline parti-cipants were “somewhat” happier, adrenalineinformed ones somewhat less happy (in the eu-phoria condition, the results failed to reach sig-nificance both for behavior and self-report).

Were Schachter and Singer successful inmaking the point that valence of a feeling is amatter of attribution of the source of an experi-enced arousal? Several powerful objections havebeen raised against this claim. Recall that sub-jects were asked to what degree they would de-scribe themselves as happy or angry. A firstproblem is that the questionnaire suggested therelevant target categories of emotions, which isdisturbingly close to influencing participants’responses (see Plutchik & Ax 1967 and Gordon1987, p. 100). Furthermore, as noted above, expost-facto reflective labeling of one’s emotiondoes not need to express one’s original feelings.As shown by Nisbett & Wilson (1977), self-re-porting is highly sensitive to rationalizationsfrom context. A second problem, mentioned bythe authors in the discussion, is that the sub-jects’ verbal reports and emotional behaviorfailed to confirm expectations in the euphoriccondition. A third methodological problem, also




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recognized by the authors, is that the studentparticipants had their own independent reasonsfor feeling anger in passing this longish test,which predisposed them to feel anger. Thereare, however, more theoretical objections.

On Schachter and Singer’s view, the corefeeling of an emotion is an arousal change,which can be artificially induced by drugs.Valence is supposedly gained through contex-tual beliefs and motives. If this view is accep-ted, why should we expect that contextuallyrelevant beliefs specify the feeling itself (e.g.,the anger experience)? Participants may indeedhave been led to believe that they were angrywhen they were actually merely aroused. Thisdoes not show, however, that they ever felt any-thing else than an arousal change (Gordon1987, pp. 100–101). Schachter and Singer mayhave only biased self-attributions and self-reporttoward target emotions. The behavioral changesthat were observed and attributed to felt emo-tion, in addition, can be imputed to social influ-ence, rather than to intrinsic changes.

A final worry is that inducing in a parti-cipant a somatic marker normally associatedwith a given feeling (e. g., increased heart rate),and providing the person with a context ration-alizing this somatic change, does not amount toan ecological way of producing a feeling. A cog-nitivist theorist of emotion will insist that themere association between a physiological cue ofthe feeling f and a context does not amount tothe realization, by a participant, that she feels fbecause she is in such and such a context (Gor-don 1987, pp. 98–99).25 As discussed in section4, the expressive mode has a nonconceptual rep-resentation of this causal connection. The archi-tectural relation between feelings and afford-ances explains why subjects experience a sys-tematic connection between their feeling andwhat it is “about”, much in the same way thatan agent experiences a systematic connection25 As Gordon observes, “one will not experience fear unless one con-

nects up that cognition with the arousal one feels. To do this re-quires, according to him, a second cognition: a recognition or beliefthat is one’s being (or taking oneself to be) in a situation of dangerthat is causing the arousal one feels. This “cognitivist” objection iscorrect when targeting S and S’s theory, who also defend a cognitiv-ist view of feelings. The present view, however, proposes anon-doxastic account of feelings, and is thus immune to this objec-tion.”

between an intention to move and the goal thatis aimed at—that is, without needing to repres-ent conceptually the causal connection betweenthe two. Nothing prevents the emoter, however,from forming a secondary conceptual represent-ation of the emotional experience she has had,and reappraising the context on the basis of herbackground beliefs. As a consequence of thisconcept-based reapparaisal, the agent mayeither discount the relevance of her initial feel-ing (as in the fear-of-snake case), or redescribeit in the richer terms that she now has available(as was done, presumably, by the Schachter andSinger participants).

Taken together, these objections have ledmost theorists to reject Schachter and Singer’stwo-factor theory of emotion, and to look for al-ternative accounts of the role of inferences inself-attribution of feelings. It is interesting tosee, however, that a two-factor theory has alsobeen applied to the case of M-feelings.

6 Are metacognitive feelings sensitive to beliefs and inferences?

What are metacognitive (also called noetic, orepistemic) feelings? Juxtaposing [being meta-cognitive] and [being a feeling] sounds, at leastprima facie, dangerously close to an oxymoron.When Descartes, Locke, and other 17th-centuryphilosophers explored the properties of ideas asbeing “clear”, “distinct”, “evident”, and “cer-tain” they certainly never took them to be feel-ings. These notions were taken, rather, to beobjective representational properties that themind, unaided by imagination, is able to detect.David Hume, in contrast, observed in his Treat-ise that “the vivacity of the idea givespleasure”, and that “its certainty prevents un-easiness by fixing one particular idea in themind, and keeping it from wavering in the mindof its objects” (Hume 1739/40, 2007, p. 289).Thus Hume was glad to accept that epistemicfeelings exist, and that they vary in their viva-city and in their pleasantness, i.e., in their in-tensity and in their valence. Following Hume’slead, let us test how our analysis of FS abovefares with the case of noetic feelings. Here,




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again, is our proposal about the general struc-ture of feelings.

• FS Affordancea [Placea=here],[Timea=now/soon], [Valencea=+/-], [Intens-itya=.n(comparatively specified on a scale 0 to1)], [motivation to acta of degreed accordingto action programa].

What is specific to noetic feelings is that the af-fordances to which the system resonates are “in-formational” or “metacognitive” rather than en-vironmental. Hence, the affordance does not re-late to the external environment (the “here”slot is often irrelevant, except for perceptual af-fordances, or place-dependent metacognitive af-fordances, such as concentrating in a noisyspot). Although a cognitive action does not, ingeneral, consist in physical moves towards oraway from an affordance, similar decisions aremotivated or inhibited in the domain of mentalagency: a high retrieval affordance motivatespursuing the memory search, a low one to quit,etc. Hence our FS analysis also applies to noeticfeelings.

As already emphasized, the affordances ex-pressed in feelings do not need to be construedconceptually in order to be detected and as-sessed through their associated somatic mark-ers. A conceptual construal, however, is sugges-ted by the names given, in the literature and inordinary language, to M-feelings. The term“feeling of knowing” (in response, for example,to the question: “what is the capital of Aus-tralia?”) implicitly presupposes that the emoterhas access to the concept of knowledge. Ex-pressing her feeling verbally, indeed, an emotermight say: “I feel that I know the response tothis question”. In this sentence, she indeedrefers to her disposition to retrieve knowledgeand, hence, metarepresents her knowledge dis-position.26 The affordance theory of noetic feel-ings suggests a different picture. When trying to

26 Arango-Muñoz (2012) claims that feelings of forgetting and feelingsof knowing are cases of “conceptual experiences”. According to thepresent view, following the lead of Koriat and colleagues, M-feelingscan overlap with judgments, and be redescribed in conceptual terms;they pertain, however, to different representational levels. There areno “conceptual experiences”, except in the sense of experiencing thecomparative fluency of concepts.

remember a proper name, a feeling of knowingis a specific experience of having the ability todetect the target, and of predicting its immin-ent recall. It can be associated with a feeling oftension (Koriat & Levy-Sadot 1999, p. 486).This experience is associated, then, with agraded, intuitive, and affect-like appraisal of a[remembering] affordance. Rhesus monkeysworking in experimental labs in comparativepsychology show that they can assess theirmemory affordances (see Beran et al. 2012,Chapter 1).27 What kind of feedback, then, domonkeys use? A surprising and substantive factabout metacognitive control, first revealedthrough the pioneering research of AsherKoriat, is that the comparator generating meta-cognitive feelings (such as a feeling of knowingin a memory task, or a feeling of clearly dis-criminating in a discrimination task) has no ac-cess to the semantic contents stored in memoryor made available through perception. InKoriat’s words, M-feelings “are mediated by theimplicit application of non-analytic heuristics,relying on a variety of cues.” These cues “per-tain to global, structural aspects of the pro-cessing of information”, such as ease of pro-cessing, time devoted to a task, familiarity, andaccessibility (Koriat 2000; Koriat & Levy-Sadot1999).28 Therefore, contrary to what epistemolo-gists have always believed, the most commontype of epistemic appraisal is not directly basedon the content of the thoughts to be evaluated,but on the properties of the underlying informa-tional process.

Neuroscientific research confirms Koriat’sclaim. Implicit, associative cues are extractedby the working brain to select, in a cost-effi-cient way, what there is to learn, to retrievefrom memory, to extract from perception, orwhat is worth storing in memory. These are allto do with the dynamics of information pro-cessing: with its onset, with the comparativeamount of activity in incompatible neural re-sponses, and with the time needed to convergeon a threshold value. Indeed, the neural activity27 As indicated above, rhesus monkeys are able, in a perceptual or

memory task, to opt out of more or less challenging trials as a resultof trial difficulty.

28 As will transpire below, all these cues are, as far as we know, dimen-sions or effects of fluency, i.e., of ease of processing.




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recorded in rats’ OFC when attempting to cat-egorize olfactory stimuli was found to correlatewith their predictive behavior (consisting in ac-cepting or rejecting a task trial); similar pat-terns have been found in other species.29

On the FS model, somatic markers havethe function of expressing the intensity andvalence of the noetic predictions generated fromfeedback at the neural level. As indicated insection 2, psychophysiological measures (elec-tromyography) provide evidence for the exist-ence of facial markers associated with feelings offluency and of disfluency (Winkielman & Ca-cioppo 2001). Increased activity in the smilemuscle, the zygomaticus major, produces feel-ings with a positive valence. A reduction of flu-ency is correlated with activity in the corrug-ator supercilii (involved in frowning), whichsuggests that this additional effort is felt as un-pleasant. Intensity of positive or negative con-fidence, computed implicitly, is expressed bythe corresponding intensity of the noetic feeling.A different somatic marker of memory appraisalis the TOT phenomenon. This often occurswhen a search in memory for a specific wordfails to retrieve that word within the usual timeinterval. The informational ingredients of FSare conveyed by the intensity of the activity inthe tongue muscle, and by the affective qualityof TOT. Taken together, these predict the like-lihood of successful retrieval. An implicitcue-based heuristic might thus explain whyTOTs have the valid predictive value they do(Schwartz et al. 2000).

29 See Kepecs et al. (2008). An interesting account of the predictiveactivity reflected in noetic feelings is that the dynamic activity inthe neurons activated by a given task correlates with the so-called“accumulation of evidence” that is diagnostic of success or failure inthat task. For example, in a perceptual discrimination task, where atarget might be categorized as an X or as a Y, evidence for each al-ternative is accumulated in parallel, until the difference exceeds athreshold, which triggers the perceptual decision. The informationthat will generate a feeling consists, first, in the differential rate ofaccumulation of evidence for the two (or more) possible responses,and second, in stored information about the threshold value, com-puted from prior trials, which the rate of accumulation should reachin order to make a cognitive decision likely to be correct. For a dis-cussion and review of the literature, see Fleming & Dolan (2012),and Proust (2013, pp. 99).

6.1 Two-factor theories of M-feelings

In our FS single-factor model, M-feelings havean intrinsic intensity and an intrinsic valence.Two-factor theories make a different claim, inways analogous to Schachter and Singer’s the-ory of aboutness in affects: M-feelings have anintrinsic arousal level, but their valence dependson the environment. Jacoby and his colleagueswere the first to embrace a two-factor viewabout feelings of fluency. They manipulatedparticipant’s exposure to an item in order toshow that enhanced fluency generates an illus-ory feeling of familiarity. Under conditions ofdivided attention, reading a list containing bothfamous and not famous names raised parti-cipants’ disposition to wrongly judge as famoussome names presented in a second list, merelybecause these names had already been read inthe first list. Schachter and Singer’s idea wasthat fluency is a generic feeling, that needs tobe interpreted on the basis of goals and currentcues, in order to deliver a qualitatively differentspecific feeling:

Inherent in the idea that the subjective ex-perience of familiarity arises from an inter-pretation of cues is the notion that cuescan be interpreted in a variety of ways. Asnoted above, if ease of identifying an itemis obviously being manipulated by the ex-perimenter, the resulting perceptual flu-ency does not give rise to a feeling of fa-miliarity. Attributions are also affected byone’s goals. In the context of attempts toremember, people may be more likely tointerpret ease of generating an item orperceiving it as familiarity. In the contextof other tasks, the same cues may be inter-preted in other ways. (Kelley & Jacoby1998, p. 129)

From their viewpoint, the fluency generated bya given name can, according to the task and theinformation made consciously available to aparticipant, be experienced as a feeling of fa-miliarity, or as a feeling of recognition of thatname as “old” (i.e., presented in a former list).They conclude that a feeling of fluency (gener-




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ated by a perceived name) will be experiencedas a function of the alternative ways of inter-preting this feeling, on the basis of the agent’sgoals and the additional cues available.30

A similar two-factor theory has been de-fended in the (Whittlesea & Williams 2000;Whittlesea & Williams 2001) model of M-feel-ings. According to this model, feelings of famili-arity result from the perception of a nonspecificdiscrepancy between the expected and the ob-served rate of processing of elements in a givencontext. Valence and the associated action guid-ance, on the other hand, are based on a concep-tual interpretation of what this discrepancymeans. For example, you find yourself waitingfor the bus next to people you expect to betotal strangers. Suddenly, you have an unexpec-tedly high fluency experience when looking atthe face of someone you have already en-countered several times—a clerk from the localgrocery shop. This unexpectedly high rate ofdiscrepancy-reduction determines an intensefeeling of familiarity with a strong motivationto identify the familiar face (see Whittlesea &Williams 2001). Had you seen the clerk in thelocal grocery store instead, you would havemerely had a feeling of recognition when seeingthe clerk.

To summarize: the core idea in two-factoraccounts is that participants have a primaryfeeling of fluency, which they interpret in morespecific terms as a function of their goals and ofthe context as they consciously represent it tobe. Thus, on this view, a feeling partly relies onbackground knowledge, and partly on a naïvetheory concerning the relation between feelingsand mental activity (Schwarz & Clore 2007).The naïve theory is as follows: feelings areabout what one is doing, so this feeling must beabout this event of trying to perceive, or thisattempt at retrieving, etc.

As already observed above, a naïve-theoryview is incompatible with monkeys’ and youngchildren’s epistemic evaluations based on flu-ency. Our FS structure offers an alternative ac-count: cues (associative heuristics) dictate how

30 Jacoby & Whitehouse (1989) similarly argue that a feeling of fluencycan be experienced as familiarity in a memory task, and as confid-ence in a problem-solving task.

an affordance is detected, assessed, and ex-ploited in a context, but these cues are not con-sciously available, and hence do not depend ona naïve theory of the task. The Jacoby andWhitehouse evidence is compatible with a pro-cedural view of engagement in a task throughautomatic memory processes, and of the feelingsof familiarity they generate. A comparator is al-ways activated as a function of a subject havingbeen highly trained in the correspondingfirst-level cognitive task. Monkeys and humansfeel that a memorial or perceptual affordance ispresent because, if they need to assess whether,for example, an item was seen earlier, the asso-ciated comparator produces a feeling of a givenintensity and valence indexing the rememberingaffordance. Thus, it is uncontroversial that acontext-dependent factor determines both thetask to be performed and the reactive metacog-nitive feeling about this task.

It does not follow from the context-de-pendence of a cognitive task, however, that aconcept-based interpretation will affect the ex-perienced feeling itself, as maintained by thetwo-factor theorist. A cue-based, non-analyticheuristic is not inferential in the interpretive,first-person sense. Regrettably, the word “infer-ence” has been loosely used in affective and inmetacognitive studies, to refer both to “auto-matic, non-analytic, largely unconscious andfast associative processes” (Nussinson & Koriat2008) and to conscious reasoning and the-ory-building (Schwarz & Clore 2007). Thesetwo types of processes (respectively called“automatic” and “controlled”), are now held bymany authors to operate independently.31 Whileunconscious heuristics rely on implicit associ-ations between cues, inferences comprise deduc-tions from premises to conclusions. Lookingback at Jacoby and Kelley’s point above, we seethat the authors are referring to unconsciouscues being recruited for a task: they are thus re-ferring to unconscious associative heuristicsrather than to explicit concept-based reasoning.The memory interactions they are exploring,31 For a defence of the distinction see Jacoby & Brooks (1984),

Koriat & Levy-Sadot (1999), Recanati (2002) and Smith &DeCoster (1999). Koriat & Levy-Sadot (1999) both emphas-ize the distinction and use the term “inference” in bothcases.




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however, typically involve both automatic andcontrolled processes, which is a source of confu-sion. As Jacoby and Kelley are eager to show,implicit associations and explicit reasoning leadto different, incompatible predictions. As a res-ult, the evidence they present shows how auto-matically-generated feelings can be theorizedabout in controlled processes. It does notdemonstrate, however, that feelings dependupon theorization. A theory of the task, in con-trast with automatically generated feelings, of-fers reasons to attribute to oneself beliefs andmotivations to act, and, possibly, to reject therelevance of feelings for any particular task.

Our proposal, then, has several advantagesover inferential or theory-based accounts off-aboutness. First, it explains why a feeling offluency can be experienced, and why it can mo-tivate agents’ metacognitive responses in speciesor individuals with no concept-based attributivecapacity (i.e., with no capacity formindreading). Second, our proposal accounts forthe difference between a type of M-feeling (afeeling of fluency) and the various ways inwhich it is experienced across cognitive tasks.Granting that comparative ease of processingcan always be computed, and can be used as areliable indicator of the likelihood of successacross a wide range of cognitive activities, it isnot surprising that there is a type of feelingbased upon it. Fluency can be perceptual, me-morial (“retrieval fluency”), or conceptual. Itcan be used in predictive or retrospective evalu-ations. If agents are asked to determine whichstatements are likely to be true or false (pre-sumably a question that only—but not all—hu-mans can understand), felt perceptual fluencywill induce a “truth effect”. Agents will evalu-ate a statement as more likely to be true thananother merely because it is easier to read.32 Ifagents are asked to detect faces of known people(or of stimuli previously shown), felt fluency willgenerate a sense of familiarity, which motivatesagents to try to identify the target. If people areasked to assess the frequency of a given phe-32 There is abundant evidence, however, that M-feelings uncritically guide

epistemic decision (i.e., are unopposed by concept-based processes)mostly when the cognitive task is unimportant, when cognitive resourcesare limited (under time pressure or divided attention), and when agentsare in a good mood (Nussinson & Koriat 2008; Schwarz 2004).

nomenon, felt retrieval fluency—that is, whatcomes immediately to mind—will be used tojudge what is more frequent. Felt fluency willalso have effects outside of metacognition: ifagents are asked which particular face, land-scape, or picture they prefer, felt fluency will in-fluence their decision. Several affordances, then,may be associated with the same globally ex-pressive type of feeling (constructed as the set offeelings with the same type of facial markers forease of processing, for example). The notion oftype of feeling is a technical term, which is usefulto distinguish the diverse ways in which fluencyis used by the brain. But a type of feeling isnever experienced; only tokens of the type are.Tokens of feelings of the same type will differ inthe specific affordances that are detected, and inthe tendencies to act that the feeling motivates.As a consequence, one cannot say that feelings offluency “feel the same” to an emoter: fluency ex-perienced in an FOK and in an FOR, for ex-ample, apply to different segments of processing,assess different things, and motivate a differentaction program. You may first have an FOKafter a question is addressed to you, and thenfail to have the associated FOR after havingcome up with a response. These differences havenothing to do with an interpretation: they areconstitutive of what sensitivity to a given afford-ance amounts to. Take the case of feelings of fa-miliarity. As summarized above, Whittlesea andWilliams claim that fluency is the core of the ex-perience, while familiarity is a conceptual inter-pretation of this core feeling. It is more econom-ical, however, to suppose that familiarity is a dif-ferent feeling within the general fluency type,and that it is associated with a different afford-ance.

In summary: engaging in a particular cog-nitive task (e.g., trying to remember, evaluatingretrieval, assessing frequency) does not need,per se, to involve a naïve theory of the task. Itonly requires having a salient affordance, andan implicit heuristic for metacognitive predic-tions in that task.




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6.2 Incidental versus integral feelings

Our proposal also allows us to address in af-fective terms the issue of incidental versus in-tegral feelings, which, in the literature, is in-variably framed in inferential terms (with allthe ambiguity relating to this expression).Metacognive feelings are called “incidental”when they are not based on valid cues for thecognitive task at hand, and hence, have no pre-dictive value. They are called “integral” whenthey actually carry information about cognitiveoutcome. Granting the universal role of fluencyin metacognition, how do people know when afeeling of fluency is relevant to a given task,and which sequence of their cognitive activityneeds to be monitored? A frequent answer, inthe literature, is that agents believe that flu-ency applies by default to the present domainof judgment. When, however, agents are led tobelieve that a feeling of fluency is purely incid-ental to the task at hand, they will discount itin their decision, on the basis of a theory of thedomain of interest (see Schwarz & Clore 2007and Whittlesea & Williams 2000, 2001). Let ussuppose, in what we shall call case (a), that anagent is explicitly told that a given cue, suchas the ease of reading a given sentence, is irrel-evant to a given task—such as assessing thetruth value of the written statement. Or, al-ternatively, let us suppose—case (b)—that theagent discovers by himself that there is a con-nection, but with reverse relevance. Perhaps hefinds that badly written sentences, involvingadded processing effort—in a given context—are likely to be true (see Unkelbach 2007 andUnkelbach & Greifeneder 2013). A popular ac-count of these cases is that people will infer re-spectively, for (a): that the feeling of fluentreading they have had is not about the targettask, which entails that reading fluency doesnot predict truth, or, for (b): that what pre-dicts the truth of a written utterance, in thisparticular context, is disfluent reading (seeSchwarz & Clore 2007, p. 394).

According to this two-factor account,M-feelings are cognitively penetrable. They canbe suppressed at will, on the basis of a reinter-pretation of their being experienced, or can even

be used to predict falsity instead of truth.33 Onthe account proposed here, in contrast, M-feel-ings are never cognitively penetrable. Why,then, do subjects stop trusting their feeling offluency? Our answer is the following. In thefirst type of case, subjects do not allow theirfeelings of fluency to guide their decision be-cause they have received verbal instructions tothis effect. In the second type of case, subjectsno longer use their feelings of fluency to forman epistemic decision in the proposed task, be-cause they have learned, over time, that thesefeelings do not predict truth in this task.

In case (a), then, subjects are confrontedwith a different task. They are no longer askedto express their confidence in the truth of agiven sentence (an intuitive, associative task);they are asked to assess the truth of sentencesby taking into account the fact that their feel-ings of fluency are irrelevant. This new task re-quires the participants to form appraisals basedon analytic reasoning. Feelings no longer drivetheir evaluation and epistemic decision.

In case (b), where bad writing is associ-ated with likely truth, no “theory of the task”needs to be formed, on top of the first-ordertask, which consists in judging whether a writ-ten statement is true or not. A mere change incue validity can produce, over time, a change inassociative heuristics, and, hence, in feelingsand in decisions to act. For example, just as ourthirsty traveller will eventually learn not totrust an apparent “drinking affordance”, anagent will learn, in certain recurrent contexts,not to trust an apparent “fluency affordance”.Obviously, cue validity can, in humans, be con-veyed verbally; this will considerably abridgethe revision process of the associated programof action. We then return to case (a): parti-cipants will be able to immediately discount anapparently valid cue, to turn to analytic ap-praisals, and to refrain from acting on their flu-ent feeling (which, however, is still there). Cuevalidity, however, can be learnt implicitly as

33 This two-factor account is endorsed by Unkelbach (2007): “the feel-ing resulting from the discrepancy is non specific, and the discrep-ancy triggers a search for an explanation […]. The experienced vari-ations are not attributed to prior exposure, resulting in a feeling offamiliarity, but to some other quality of the statement, namely, thata statement is true.”




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well, which weakens the case for a theory-ladenview of feelings.

These observations suggest that feel-ing-based and analytic appraisal, as hypothesizedin this proposal, “tap separate databases repres-enting knowledge in different formats.”34 A feelingof fluency, as a result, can survive being discoun-ted in decision-making. Another finding points inthe same direction. There is evidence that, evenwhen an M-feeling has been explicitly discounted(i.e., shown to agents to unduly bias their epi-stemic assessment), the initial feeling remains un-affected, and is able to promote further epistemicdecisions. In Nussinson & Koriat’s (2008) study,agents exposed to unsolved anagrams and to ana-grams accompanied by their solution, were askedto rate the difficulty of these anagrams for naïveparticipants with no prior access to the solution.The participants’ ratings were influenced by thedifferential fluency that the anagrams presentedfor them: the higher fluency of solved anagramsbiased their attributions of difficulty. After beinginformed of the contaminating effect of knowingthe solutions, the participants were invited to cor-rect their attributions by re-rating the difficultyof the anagrams, which they did. However, theparticipants were subjected to a subsequent test,where, under time pressure, they had to predictwhich of two anagrams would be harder for oth-ers to solve. These other-attributions of difficultypresented, again, the same bias for known ana-grams. Being under pressure allowed participants’M-feelings to guide decision. The verbal instruc-tion could shift their controlled responses whenre-rating the anagrams, but did not lead the par-ticipants to recompute them, as should have beenthe case if feelings are cognitively penetrable.

In summary: what participants learned(that solved anagrams only look easier to pro-cess) did not influence what they felt later(higher fluency is diagnostic of ease of solving).

7 Are all feelings affective?

It is often noticed that a phenomenological con-trast seems to exist between feelings—that is,they are not equally emotional. Are not M-feel-34 A quote from Smith & DeCoster (1999), p. 329, who offer a strong

defence of this view.

ings in general as “cold” as the proprioceptivefeeling that my right arm is being extended? Orcan they also be “hot”—that is, involve valence,i.e., be pleasant or unpleasant? Our proposal ofa common expressive evaluative format suggeststhat all the feelings vary in affect in roughly thesame way, because they all include valence intheir informational structure. Stepper & Strack(1993), however, have emphasized that epi-stemic feelings are “cold”. Feelings like effort,familiarity, surprise, or feeling of knowing “haveno fixed valence”, in the sense that they don’tfeel particularly good or bad. Linguistic researchon the emotional lexicon is invoked as congru-ent evidence: for words referring to readiness,success, and a desire to deal with new informa-tion (like “alert” “confused”), i.e., terms ex-pressing metacognition, affects are not “focal”,which implies that they are not centrally emo-tional (Ortony et al. 1987).

There is abundant evidence, however, thatfeelings of fluency increase perceivers’ liking ofthe objects perceived. Familiar items (otherthings being equal) are found to be more pleas-ant than new ones. An initially neutral stimulusis felt to be pleasant after repeated exposure.This “exposure effect”, first demonstrated byZajonc, has been attributed to increased percep-tual fluency (Zajonc 1968). This affective effectof fluency has since been found to apply to anydimension of a perceptual input. The sense ofbeauty in a symmetrical face or in a landscape,or the pleasure felt in contemplating a pictureseem to be inherent to the feeling of fluencygenerated in the perception. As noted above,psychophysiological measures in the facialmuscles provide additional evidence for the af-fective character of the feeling of fluency (Reberet al. 2004; Winkielman & Cacioppo 2001; for areview see Oppenheimer 2008).

An interesting, untested, speculation in-tended to explain the presence of cold and hotversions of feelings is that valence, althoughnever fully absent from monitoring, is modu-lated by dynamic aspects of the task underevaluation (Carver & Scheier 1990; Carver &Scheier 2001). On this view, affective feelingscan appear in physical and cognitive action, andprobably also in somatosensory experience,




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when certain dynamic conditions for affectivereactions are present. But what are these condi-tions?

Let us first examine an area where thesedynamic conditions seem to have a minimalrole. This is the area of first-order motor control(including the initiation of an action, the monit-oring of its development, and of goal comple-tion). As with any other form of control, motorcontrol involves specialized feelings, in theabove sense of subjective experiences with a dis-tinctive embodied phenomenal quality (seePacherie 2008). At first glance, these feelings donot typically seem to be affective.35 Why is thisso? According to Carver and Scheier, this canbe explained by the dynamics of a monitoredactivity that generates feelings. Affective feel-ings are part of a second-order type of feedback,having, in their terms, “the meta-monitoringfunction” of “checking on how well the actionloop is doing at reducing the behavioral discrep-ancy that the action loop is monitoring”. Thismeta-loop, then, monitors a particular aspect ofone’s progress in relation to one’s distal goal: itrepresents “the rate of discrepancy reduction inthe behavioral (monitoring) system over time”.This dynamic representation is what a feeling isequipped to offer: the intensity and quality of apositive, or a negative, feeling express how farabove, or how far below, the observed rate ofdiscrepancy reduction is, with respect to somereference value. One consequence of this view, ifit turns out to be experimentally validated, isfascinating and deep: affect in action does notdepend merely on the amount of discrepancybeing reduced. An agent may be an inexperi-enced performer in a task; if the velocity of herprogress to the goal is higher than expected, shewill feel more confident, and have retrospect-ively more positive feelings when reaching hergoal than a competent performer whose pro-gress to the goal is as steady as predicted.

There is a second type of affect, accordingto Carver and Scheier, that the dynamics ofprediction can generate. Acceleration is the rateof change of velocity. Feelings express such ac-celeration when the rate of discrepancy reduc-35 Even in this domain, however, an error signal, when conscious, is as-

sociated with an unpleasant feeling.

tion increases beyond expectancy—a sense ofexhilaration then occurs. Lucky athletes, whobreak several records within days, experiencethis. Symmetrical feelings of sinking, or despair,arise when the rate of discrepancy reduction de-celerates unexpectedly and falls below the ex-pected threshold more quickly than anticipated.In summary, cold motor feelings are generatedwhen one is routinely acting on the world, whenthings develop as expected, except for small mo-tor adjustments. Hot action feelings are gener-ated when action monitoring involves unexpec-ted dynamics of reduction or increment of likelysuccess or failure.

How does this theory apply to M-feelings?A similar contrast may exist in M-feelings.Carver and Scheier’s model allows us to predictthat M-feelings can have colder and warmervarieties, depending on the dynamics of the dis-crepancy reduction that they express. As seenabove, there are two varieties of M-feelings, dis-tinguished by their function. Some, like FOKs,have a predictive function. Others, like FORs,perform retrospective evaluation. Neuroscient-ists explain these feelings through the rate ofthe accumulation of evidence, measured throughthe comparative activity of the neural assem-blies involved in cognitive decision. (This rateof accumulation has to be compared with astored standard in order to produce a reliablefeeling of confidence.) From this widely accep-ted model, it follows that the rate of reductionof discrepancy toward a confidence threshold isautomatically computed, and plausibly ex-pressed through somatic markers that them-selves have a varying intensity.

If this reasoning is correct, then althoughall M-feelings do not often have a definite “hot”quality comparable to fear and love, they al-ways have a valence, according to whether theypredict an agent’s progress towards or awayfrom her cognitive goal. To find more intenseM-feelings, however, one needs to look at thedynamics of meta-monitoring, which is when anagent expects a given rate of reduction of thediscrepancies toward her cognitive goal, andeither observes a rate that is well above the ex-pected rate or well below it. In these cases, thesense of confidence that the positively surprised




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agent experiences is modulated by an intense,highly motivating affect of joy and renewed pas-sion for the associated cognitive activity; whilethe uncertainty of the negatively surprisedagent is associated with an intense, highly de-motivating affect of discouragement, or loss ofinterest. Note how crucial an intense feeling ofthis kind can be, especially with regard to fu-ture motivation. It can precipitate in children apassion for learning; or it can lead them to re-ject an activity, or even a whole group of sim-ilar activities, because of the threatening affectassociated with the activity, often combinedwith a still more threatening social affect (thesense of being an inferior, incompetent per-former, or of being stupid). This kind ofmeta-monitoring cognitive affect, important asit is in predicting and fuelling epistemic motiva-tion, is not easily observable in experimentalsettings, because it is elicited in middle orlong-term forms of cognitive tasks, such asstudying at school in a given grade, learning al-gebra, etc. This may in part explain why Step-per and Strack have failed to encounter it.

To summarize: noetic feelings, like allfeelings, have an evaluative function. They arethe output of a monitoring process, which ex-presses how likely it is that an agent’s cognit-ive preferences or goals will be (or have been)fulfilled in a given task and context. They allhave a valence, but their affective tonality ismore intensely felt in special cases that arisewhen meta-monitoring makes “intensivelynew” affordances salient. The rate or the accel-eration with which an observed initial discrep-ancy differs from a predicted standard valuemay either exceed the expected value, therebyproducing positive feelings of confidence orfeelings of knowing, or be insufficient to reachthis value, producing negative feelings of un-certainty. The intensity of positive or negativeaffect in M-feelings thus depends on particu-larly unexpected properties of the underlyingcognitive activity.

8 Conclusion

On the present proposal, “feelings” are notisolated sensory events. They are, rather, the

ingredients of a nonlinguistic expressive modethat allows organisms to evaluate and predictenvironmental changes and affordances. Thisexpressive mode is of a relational, intensivekind that is not suitable for a predicative,concept-based representation of the world. Asa consequence, feelings are not themselvesjudgments about the world or about one’sown thoughts. They are not “about” anythingin the objective, referring sense of the term.Feelings are able to approximate (in their ownmode) the guidance offered by full-blownjudgments, and hence can be re-described inconceptual terms when the latter are availableto the emoter.

The importance of the duality betweenan expressive and a propositional system ofrepresentation has generally been overlooked.Even dual-processing theorists rarely appreci-ate that the two systems involved in cognitiveevaluation and in reasoning have their own in-dependent, although asymmetrical, role toplay. A purely automatic, reactive type ofevaluation is possible, and is present in non-humans and young children. It is prone, how-ever, to generating throughout life illusions ofcompetence and reasoning errors. A conceptu-ally-controlled type of evaluation, on theother hand, can partially inhibit the influenceof the expressive system, but it still dependson the latter to weigh the impact of contexton ability, and to assess the trade-off betweenease of processing and informativeness—thatis, relevance—that is crucial in communica-tion and in problem solving.

A major practical consequence of the du-ality between the two target representationalmodes concerns pedagogy. Children cannotlearn what they are not motivated to learn.Their motivation heavily depends on theirsubjective experience of what a school contextaffords them. Their feelings of confidence, i.e.,the feedback from the cognitive tasks they en-gage in, have to be sufficiently positive andappropriately calibrated in order for them toform their own realistic and motivating cog-nitive goals. No amount of analytic reasoningcan replace a positive experience when learn-ing.




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Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Dick Carter, Laurence Conty,Terry Eskenazy, Martin Fortier, JonathanFrome, Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer Windtfor their critical comments. Special thanks toDick Carter for his linguistic advice, to TonyMarcel, whose critical questions about the com-monality between M-feelings and affective feel-ings inspired the present article, and to RobertGordon, for giving me access to some of his un-published writings. This research has been sup-ported by an ERC Senior Grant “Dividnorm” #269616, and by two institutional grants:ANR-11-LABX-0087IEC and ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02 PSL.

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The Representational Structure of Feelings