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Two Levels of Metacognition

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Abstract

Two main theories about metacognition are reviewed, each of which claims to provide a better explanation of this phenomenon, while discrediting the other theory as inappropriate. The paper claims that in order to do justice to the complex phenomenon of metacognition, we must distinguish two levels of this capacity—each having a different structure, a different content and a different function within the cognitive architecture. It will be shown that each of the reviewed theories has been trying to explain only one of the two levels and that, consequently, the conflict between them can be dissolved. The paper characterizes the high-level as a rationalizing level where the subject uses concepts and theories to interpret her own behavior and the low-level as a controlling level where the subject exploits epistemic feelings to adjust her cognitive activities. Finally, the paper explores three kinds of interaction between the levels.

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Notes

  1. It is still a matter of hot debate whether all these mental attitudes are propositional; especially in the cases of perception, emotion and feeling. And it is also unclear if all the metarepresentational theorists hold a propositional view of attitudes. To my knowledge, within the group of metarepresentational theorists, at least Carruthers (2009b) is committed to this view. My own view is that the content of perception, emotion and feelings is nonconceptual and non-propositional, though I am not going to claim so here.

  2. However, there is a lively debate about the onset of mindreading abilities, with some researchers claiming that infants of 15 months already understand false beliefs (see e.g. Onishi & Baillargeon 2005). I thank an anonymous peer-reviewer for this remark.

  3. I say “almost” because Carruthers’ later account of mindreading acknowledges that first person mindreading has access to some cues (such as visual, auditory and motor imagery and inner speech) that the third person mindreading does not have access to. This creates a quantitative difference but not a qualitative one: access in both cases is interpretative and thus its epistemic status remains the same.

  4. Even if Hieronymi never speaks of metacognition as such, it seems to me that her theory of metal control can be understood as a control theory of metacognition, regardless of whether or not she uses the term and of whether or not we accept her account.

  5. This might seem to commit me to Evans’ (2008) and Carruthers’ (2009b) thesis that behaviour is always driven by system 1. However, my claim is that it is so driven when system 1 can cope with the situation or problem; otherwise system 2 is activated, as Thompson claims (2009).

  6. Fluency is a property of the way a cognitive system treats a pieace of information. A piece of information is more or less fluent according to the easiness or difficulty of the processing of the signal. For example, adding some noice to a perceptual signal makes perceptual proccessing less fluent. (Whittlesea 1993; Whittlesea et al. 1990; Whittlesea and Williams 2001)

  7. Carruthers’ metarepresentational view of metacognition in terms of mindreading would belong to option (A) since it presuppose the existence of only one mechanism, but it cannot be considered to be in competition with the other accounts since it begins by rejecting the existence of low-level metacognition.

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Acknowledgments

I am particularly indebted to Fabián Bernache, Jerome Dokic, Joëlle Proust, Kirk Michaelian, Tobias Schlicht and three anonymous peer-reviewers for their thorough comments and corrections to this paper. I also received valuable comments from David Papineau, Albert Newen, Reinaldo Bernal and David Fajardo. This work was supported by the Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), Tübingen, Germany.

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  1. Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Paul-Ehrlich-Str. 17, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Santiago Arango-Muñoz

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Arango-Muñoz, S. Two Levels of Metacognition. Philosophia 39, 71–82 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9279-0

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