New Books in Philosophy Joelle Proust, “The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness” (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Dec 15, 2014
Joelle Proust, Director of research at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, dives deep into metacognition—essentially thinking about thinking. She discusses how both humans and some non-human animals like macaques exhibit metacognitive abilities, from assessing memory to decision-making confidence. Proust contrasts evaluative and metarepresentational accounts of metacognition, shedding light on cognitive disorders related to schizophrenia. With insights from psychology and philosophy, she argues for the interconnectedness of these fields in understanding mental agency.
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Two Distinct Modes Of Metacognition
- Metacognition splits into procedural evaluation and meta-representational attribution as distinct processes.
- These differ in explanatory scope, dynamical feedback, forms of evaluation, and relation to mental action.
Different Heuristics For Observers And Performers
- In Koriat and Ackerman's experiment, observers predicted memory from study duration while performers used the opposite heuristic.
- This shows self-evaluation uses dynamic internal cues while observers rely on conceptual beliefs.
Animals Use Dynamic Cues For Metacognition
- Nonhuman animals show procedural metacognition using opt-out tasks and dynamic cues of difficulty and success.
- Neural evidence links these dynamic patterns to prediction of success, similar across species.