A First Look on FOR/W Research Through a Distinction

At this point, I want to make one intentionality/content/particular-object-based distinc-tion betweenperformance-directed FOR/Ws and object-directed FOR/Ws. Most if not all work that is explicitly concerned with “feeling of rightness” or “feeling of wrongness”

focuses on the former. Performance-directed FOR/Ws indicate that one has successfully or unsuccessfully performed some operation, activity or action, say computed the result of 2 + 3, recalled the capital of Australia or drawn a conclusion. In other words, they evaluate a self-generated performance.¹⁹³

As Mangan notes “feelings of rightness and wrongness are able to indicate the success or failure of what are otherwise distinct cognitive activities” (Mangan 2001, p. 17).¹⁹⁴ Man-gan mentions here specificallycognitive activities, giving FOR/Ws a clearly metacogni-tive spin (see also section 5.3.3 and 6.4). With this metacognimetacogni-tive focus, he is in good

192The unitary kind view is, however, more restricted on the variability it allows. This is because it additionally requires that despite variability along some dimensions, some essential aspects remain in place as to justify speaking of the same kind.

193One might furthermore distinguish between performance-directed and activity-directed FOR/Ws.

While the former is directed onto a successfully or unsuccessfully terminated activity, the latter is directed onto an ongoing activity which in turn is successfully or unsuccessfully unfolding. It seems that the former caninter aliabe based on theoutcome (and its properties) such as the com-puted result or drawn conclusion while the latter can only be based on non-outcome feedback in the form of cues such as the amount of time an activity is taking to run to completion (i.e. fluency).

James’ “feeling of [...] a right or wrong direction in the thought” (James 1890, p. 261) is, I submit, best conceptualised as an activity-directed FOR/W where we feel that our thought is on the right (or wrong) track without being aware of where it is headed exactly.

194In fact, Mangan appears to conceptualise the FOK as a kind of activity-directed FOR that is directed at retrieval processes (Mangan 2000). Mangan’s position seems to be that most epistemic feelings are essentially FOR/Ws with different contents/particular objects. I disagree: I think that e.g. FOKs, FOFs and FORs are different in kind from each other. In fact, a FOK, FOF and a FOR can have the same particular object, say, Diego Vel´azquez’ iconic paintingLas Meninas while being still different kinds of experiences and having distinct formal objects (see section 7.4).

company (see e.g. also Thompson, Prowse Turner, et al. 2011; Fernandez Cruz et al.

2016). In fact, most if not all of the research explicitly concerned with FOR/Ws is not only specific to performance-directed FOR/Ws but to performance-directed FOR/Ws where the evaluated self-generated performance iscognitive in nature. Taking one’s hint from performance-involving Oddly Satisfying videos and OCD-research, there seems to be no principled reason, however, to restrict performance-based FOR/Ws (and other FOR/Ws, really) to the cognitive domain. That is, performance-based FOR/Ws do not have to be metacognitive in the sense of being about first-order cognitive processes or states—at least when it comes to what is apparent on the personal level.¹⁹⁵ Washing one’s hands, recreating the form of a specific bodyweight exercise or releasing an arrow when shooting a bow can feel right or wrong in a similar fashion.¹⁹⁶

Performance-directed FOR/Ws are closely related to feelings of confidence or certainty and might be (in some contexts) identical to them. To illustrate this point, it is instruc-tive to take a look at the work of Valerie Thompson, the primary source of research that is explicitly on the FOR. Thompson and colleagues, for instance, presented subjects with a conditional statement such as (Thompson, Prowse Turner, et al. 2011, p. 113):

• If a car runs out of gas, then it will stall.

They were then asked to assess the logical validity of one of the following inferences, responding with “yes” in case it is valid and otherwise with “no”:

195That is, I want to leave it open that there might be some sense in which (some of) these feelings are metacognitive when one looks at the subpersonal level (see also section 5.3.3 and 6.4). Take for instance the FOW you experience looking at upward flowing water. This particular instance of a FOW might actually be caused by a specific cognitive process or one or several of its properties, say, its disfluency. Nevertheless, on a personal level, the feeling itself representswhat you see as wrong, not the seeing. It is the upward flowing water that appears wrong, not the processes through which you take in the upward flowing water. The disfluency can be understood as a metacognitive cue, i.e.

as a property that is informative about a cognitive process. This cue, in turn, is causally implicated in the generation of the FOW. For some this might render the FOW metacognitive. Nonetheless, it should be clear that such a metacognitive nature is not apparent to the subject having the FOW. To her the FOW appears not about herself but about the world; it is as much about the wrongness of the upward flowing water as Linda’s fear is about the dangerousness of the approaching bear (and not, say, about her inability to fight the bear).

196The FOR/Ws here would not be metacognitive if one understands “cognitive” in a restricted sense as relating to thought and its kin. They would be metacognitive if one has a liberal take on what is

“cognitive” as related to information processing in general. Information processing, of course, also prominently figures in the performance of e.g. motor activity. In fact, some of the central elements of some theories of metacognition are directly inspired by the monitoring and control architectures that implement motor activity (Proust 2015). Note that if metacognition is defined with a very broad concept of “cognitive” in mind, it might make the resulting concept of metacognition unsuit-able in respect to some explanatory projects such as explaining metarepresentational capacities (cf.

Carruthers 2017a, see also section 5.3.3 and 6.4).

1. The car has run out of gas. Therefore it will stall.

2. The car has not stalled. Therefore it did not run out of gas.

3. The car has stalled. Therefore it ran out of gas.

4. The car has not run out of gas. Therefore it will not stall.

Crucially, the researchers were interested in measuring the subjects’ “feeling of right-ness”. How did they go about it? After each validity judgment they required a subject to respond to the statement “at the time I provided my answer I felt”. For their response the subject could choose between seven options on a scale ranging from “guessing” (1 on a Likert-scale) to “Certain I’m right” (7 on a Likert-scale). This report was supposed to tap a FOR and its magnitude. The task is performance-directed and metacognitive by design, measuring a FOR directed at one’s cognitive performance (for an analogous take on the FOW see Gangemi et al. 2015; Fernandez Cruz et al. 2016). In fact, what is measured here can be straightforwardly characterised as a feeling of confidence or cer-tainty about one’s response.¹⁹⁷ Or, perhaps more concisely, one could term the FORs at hand as “feelings of success” (FOSs). This would be analogous to the practice adopted in FOW research where performance-directed FOWs are aptly termed “feelings of error”

(FOEs) (see e.g. Gangemi et al. 2015).

Be it as it may, in contrast to (cognitive) performance-directed FOR/Ws,object-directed FOR/Ws can be directed at any object. Insofar, (cognitive) performance-directed FOR/Ws emerge as a subset of object-directed FOR/Ws, namely those that take self-generated (cognitive) actions or activities as their intentional objects. As the example of a FOR directed at a particular furniture arrangement and a FOW directed at upward flowing water demonstrate, FOR/Ws plausibly do not have to concern anything the sub-ject did. Instead, they can concern apparently external or subsub-ject-independent things, without any explicit self-reference. In fact, the apparent self-reference in performance-directed FOR/Ws is likely due to their specific particular objects: self-generated perfor-mances are particular objects with built-in self-reference. On the face of it, considering the personal level, there is nothing intrinsically self-referential, performance-directed or metacognitive about FOR/Ws. We can have feelings that mark all kinds of things as right or wrong—not only one’s own cognitive performances. I insist on this point because

197Perhaps one could draw a distinction betweenprospective and post-evaluative feelings of confidence or certainty (Proust 2008). While the formerpredicts the success of an activity similar to the FOK predicting retrieval success, the latter signals the successful execution of an activity. One can then call the former feelings of confidence proper and the latter feelings of rightness. In the literature this distinction is often not made and both are called feelings of confidence.

my focus here will lie on object-directed FOR/Ws that are not (primarily) directed at performances or activities.

This is not to say that the relationship between performance-directed FOR/Ws and FOR/Ws directed at other objects is always straightforward. Consider again the task of Thompson and colleagues. What I am interested in is not so much the basis for the subject’s judgment about her performance which, as the researchers seem to assume, might indeed be a performance-directed FOR. What I am interested in is the basis for the subject’s judgment of logical validity since this will (sometimes) be the object-directed FOR concerning the conclusion of the inference. If both FORs (of different kind or content) exist, they are likely not the same. However, it might well be that (sometimes) the subject does not base her judgment of her performance on a performance-directed FOR but on her FOR that directly concerns the conclusion of the inference and its rightness.¹⁹⁸ That is, there is just one conclusion-directed FOR that does double duty:

it guides the assessment of logical validityand the assessment of one’s performance.¹⁹⁹ The FOR is used to answer the question “Am I right?” because it provides an answer to the question “Is this right?”²⁰⁰

198Talking of object-directed FORs that are not performance/activity-directed and that concern infer-ences might be a bit confusing since inferinfer-ences are best understood as transitional activities rather than as objects. Talking of FORs that concern the conclusion of an inference seem to be a better al-ternative here. These conclusion-directed FORs are still about the inference in virtue of being about the result of the inference: the conclusion. Inference-directed FORs, on the other hand, are best understood as performance- or activity-directed FORs that concern the act of drawing an inference.

Note that the specific rightness of a conclusion and thus of a conclusion-directed FOR is intertwined with the specific premises that are given in a context. This implies that one and the same content might feel right as a conclusion against the background of given premises, and at the same time feel wrong on other grounds. For instance,2 + 2 = 5 feels wrong taken for itself. Though as a conclusion drawn from premises (1) “If the pope is a woman, then 2 + 2 = 5” and (2) “The pope is a woman”, it might feel right. This shows that inferential validity can sometimes be a highly context-specific or localised kind of rightness that might be at odds with other kinds of rightness when e.g. conclusions might be valid but not sound. In fact, people often tend to confuse different kinds of rightness such as (context-specific) logical validity and plausibility (see e.g. Klauer et al. 2000, see also section 8.3.3).

199Alternatively, since the two assessments take place at different moments, it is one’srecollection of the conclusion-directed FOR that is the basis for the assessment of one’s performance: one recalls to what extent the conclusion appeared right to one and judges one’s confidence accordingly.

200This is similar to an idea of Evans (see also section 138):

I get myself in position to answer the question whether I believe thatp by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whetherp. (Evans 1982, p. 225)

Gordon later gave this procedure a general formulation and termed it the “ascent routine”:

Because this procedure answers a metacognitive question by answering a question at the next lower semantic level, I will call it anascent routine. (Gordon 1995, p. 60)

To illustrate this double duty idea I ask you to have another look at the above-mentioned inferences from Thompson’s study and put yourself into the shoes of one of the partic-ipants. Likely you will have discerned that 1. is an instance of modus ponens (MP) and 2. ofmodus tollens (MT). Therefore, they are valid inferences. On the other hand, 3. is an instance of affirming the consequent (AC) and 4. of denying the antecedent (DA) and as such invalid inferences. The important aspect is how you arrived at these assessments. When reading the conclusions you might have had the feeling that some of them are right or, on the contrary, that some of them are wrong. These feelings presumably—perhaps together with some other determinants such as explicit analytic double checking²⁰¹ —have engendered your judgement that 1. and 2. are correct while 3. and 4. are incorrect.²⁰² Of course, it is quite possible that your feelings led you, say, in the case of AC astray and you thought it correct. After all, AC is a widespread fallacy partlybecause it often exerts some pull to judge it correct by triggering fallacious FORs.

Now, asked for your degree of confidence in your answer, what do you do? An obvious way is to use or recall the quality of one’s feeling.

This becomes all the more plausible if one imagines a slightly modified task where the subject does not judge a given conclusion but, provided with a conditional and an antecedent, has to come up with a conclusion herself (see also Thompson, Prowse Turner, et al. 2011, experiment 3). In some cases, one’s answer will be accompanied by a FOR that marks it as right. Is this now a performance-directed or a conclusion-directed FOR? It seems that it can serve as a basis for evaluating both: performance and conclusion. Or put differently: it can serve to evaluate the answering (performance-directed) as well as its result, the answer (object-(performance-directed). Which evaluative dimension

201Such checks might have e.g. proceeded via constructing truth-tables or by rehearsing the premises and what follows and does not follow from them. One might, for example, get clear about the fact that in the case of AC it was never asserted that running out of gas is theonly condition in which the car stalls. It is well possible that, confronted with such statements, one does not have a FOR/W right away but that they occur in the course or as a result of further reflective engagement with the elements of the inference.

202Compare this to an example from Boghossian 2003 discussed in detail by Chudnoff 2014b in the context of intuition:

(1) If today is the 20th, then Martha Argerich is playing today in Carnegie Hall. [...]

(2) Today is the 20th. [...]

(3) Martha Argerich is playing today in Carnegie Hall. (Boghossian 2003, p. 225)

In its basic form, thisMP example is very similar to 1. above. The claim is that we (might) have the positive intuition that (3). This is presumably so because (3) follows from (1) and (2), i.e. that (3) is true given (1) and (2). However, we draw the conclusion (3) not only because it demonstrably follows logically but because we have the intuition that (3) follows, given (1) and (2). This intuition—

perhaps together with more explicit checks—leads us to infer or judge that (3). We might also say that (3) feels right and that is (partly) why we infer or judge accordingly.

will appear more salient will likely depend on the specific situation such as the specific task, instructions and one’s goals. Note that, intuitively, it appears that one cannot assess one’s performance independently of whether one’s answer seems right or wrong to one.²⁰³ Thus, the conclusion-directed FOR seems more basic. There might be a phenomenal basis to this impression: When I contemplate an issue and conjure up related thoughts, those among them that appear right to me seem to be right independently of me, at least in the first place.²⁰⁴ However, on the subpersonal level, one’s apparently

“objective” FORs might ultimately be based on features of one’s performance or on other subject-specific factors (more on this in section 7.3.4, 7.3.3 and 8.1).

These reflections establish some relevance of Thompson’s work for my topic despite its metacognitive performance-focus. I will thus incorporate some of its insights. Thomp-son establishes that rightness/confidence ratings arepositively correlated with 1) answer fluency, i.e. the speed with which a response is given, 2) probability of conclusion accep-tance, 3) logical validity, 4) “believability”, i.e. the real-world plausibility of a conclusion or the degree to which it is congruent with typical beliefs andnegatively correlated with 5) conflict, i.e. if a conclusion is logically valid but not believable (e.g. “If a plant has roots, then it is a tree. This plant has roots. Therefore, it is a tree.”) or vice versa, 6) re-thinking time, i.e. in conditions where subjects were given the possibility to rethink and possibly change their initial “FOR-response” a lower FOR-rating was associated with longer rethinking time and 7) higher answer change probability. Thompson takes 6) and 7) to indicate analytic engagement, suggesting that a high/low FOR leads to a low/high amount of analytic engagement or scrutinizing behaviour (Thompson, Prowse Turner, et al. 2011; Thompson and Morsanyi 2012; Thompson, Turner, et al. 2013; Thompson and Johnson 2014a).

To sum up: in this section, I introduced and illustrated the distinction between performance-and object-directed FOR/Ws. Then I outlined how the bulk of research explicitly con-cerned with FOR/Ws (mainly work of Thompson and colleagues) focuses on the former.

Finally, I summarised the findings of this research. In the next section, we will encounter

203As FOKs and prospective feelings of confidence or certainty show, one might nevertheless predict whether one’s activity is likely to be successful.

204In fact, I often need to re-analyse certain thoughts in order to identify them as the product of my specific (theoretical) commitments or wishful thinking. Insofar it is hazardous to assume that the products of e.g. wishful thinking are phenomenally forthcoming about their wishful or subject-dependent natureto the subject. Wishful thoughts might, at first glance and without further checks, seem just as objectively right as non-wishful thoughts (cf. Koksvik 2011, p. 200). In fact, typically the wishful nature of one’s thinking needs to be pointed out to one by someone else (see also footnotes 70 and 169).

work that is similar to Thompson’s but differs in the crucial respect that it looks at what is plausibly construed as object-directed FOR/Ws that are not about performance.