How can you be sure? Epistemic feelings as a monitoring system for cognitive contents

In the view we embrace, reasoning, intuition as well as other cognitive processes are accompanied by subjective experiences – i.e. by feelings – that are related to them. In the literature these are called epistemic feelings. Epistemic feelings are considered to have a wide range of applications and to inform us about a number of characteristics related to the epistemic assessment of any cognitive content we possess. For instance, they tell us whether something we know is certain, uncertain, interesting, boring, doubtful, ambiguous, correct, plausible, informative, relevant, coherent or related to something else. To understand how epistemic feelings work is essential for comprehending any kind of thinking process including any kind of reasoning process. In this work, we first analyze epistemic feelings with the aim of describing their nature and function. Secondly, we explore the analogies and differences between somatic, emotional and epistemic feelings and try to show that epistemic feelings are not epistemic emotions and that somatic, emotional and epistemic feelings are actually the outcome of three different automatic monitoring systems that works using the same kind of signals but are triggered by different systems. Finally, we show that epistemic feelings guide us to choose specific kinds of reasoning processes over others: that they determine whether we rely on intuitions rather than on analytic reasoning, that they not necessarily lead us to do the best choice for the context, but that they can be trained to become better guides for us.