Cognitive Feelings: An Essay on the Affective Interfaces of the Mind

This book proposes a comprehensive theory of cognitive feelings, also referred to as 'noetic', 'epistemic', or 'metacognitive' feelings. There are pivotal moments in our mental lives when, even before we have explicitly thought or reflected on the matter, we become aware of our own epistemic relationship with the world and the extent to which we can exert control over it. The book analyses these moments and the subjective experiences involved, which can be fleeting or more lasting. These experiences are cognitive feelings, such as feelings of familiarity, knowing, confidence, rightness, understanding, certainty, presence, and reality and, on the negative side, feelings of unfamiliarity or strangeness, not knowing, wrongness, perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, absence, and unreality. Some cognitive feelings have evocative names, such as the tip-of-the-tongue experience, the 'aha' moment, or the 'eureka' effect.