Philosophy Compass 5/11 (2010): 989998, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00340.

Metacognition
Joelle Proust*
Institut Jean-Nicod

Abstract

Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self-knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition the control of ones cognition is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self-ascriptive view, has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing ones own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read ones mind. The main claims of this view are articulated, and the difculties that they raise are discussed. An alternative view of metacognition, the self-evaluative view, is then examined. It is argued that this view provides an account of metacognition that is both empirically and conceptually more adequate than the self-ascriptive model. Particular attention is given to the problem of transferring self-evaluative judgments to the case of others.

The term metacognition is used to refer to the kinds of processes involved, and the selfknowledge gained, in thinking about, and in controlling, ones own thinking. Given the existence of divergent accounts of the architecture of the mind, the nature of self-knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and scope of metacognition is still a matter of hot debate. Does metacognition necessarily require representing ones own mental states as mental states, and thus necessarily involve an ability to read ones own mind? Does it instead merely require the ability to control and monitor ones cognitive processes, possibly on the basis of nonconceptual, representational processes? This debate often appears to be a matter of terminology (should nonconceptual control of ones thought be called metacognitive?). A denition of metacognition, however, should carve nature at its joints, i.e., it should be sensitive to empirical evidence about cognitive function. In the rst section, the major claims constituting the self-attributive view, according to which metacognition presupposes the ability to metarepresent ones mental states, will be presented. The second section will expose the empirical and conceptual difculties that these claims raise. The third section will present an alternative view on metacognition, called the self-evaluative view. 1. The Self-Attributive View (SAV) The self-attributive view has been defended by a number of authors, most notably, Flavell (1979), Tim Shallice (1988), Alan Leslie (1987), Dan Dennett (1991), Josef Perner (1991), Alison Gopnik (1993), and Peter Carruthers (2008, 2009). It is based on the following line of reasoning.
1.1.
THE SEMANTIC CONDITION

Metacognition coincides with the acquisition, or possession, of second-order propositional attitudes such as I believe that I believe that P, I believe that I intend to F etc.
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Thinking about ones thinking occurs when, and only when, a belief, or other propositional attitude, is formed about ones thought contents. Self-attributing a perception thus requires applying the concept of perception to the content of ones perceptual state, and forming a second-order attribution to the effect that one judges that one perceives F. Self-attributing a belief, similarly, requires recognizing a rst-order occurrent belief as a belief.
1.2.
SELF-ATTRIBUTION OF THOUGHT REQUIRES METAREPRESENTATIONS

How can a thinker form the thought, when perceiving that P, that she entertains content P, and, furthermore, that P is being perceived, rather than, say, imagined? SAV theorists hypothesize that a specialized representational device takes an occurrent thought content P as input, and produces the representation I believe (or perceive, or imagine, etc.) that P as output. In the process, the rst-order content of thought is redeployed in a self-ascriptive thought (Peacocke 1999). An important project raised by the foregoing is that of specifying this representational device in more detail. Is it specialized for self-ascription? Does it also take emotional or sensory states as input? Three main hypotheses have been explored by SAV theorists. 1 According to the rst hypothesis, self-ascribing thoughts depends on a more general capacity for the ascription of thoughts (whether to self or to others). This view is often associated with an evolutionary story where self-knowledge is shaped by the needs of social cognition. There are two main ways to defend it. i. Self-ascribing mental states relies on the possession, by a thinker, of a folk-theory about the mental, acquired during childhood (the theory theory account of mindreading: Wimmer and Perner 1983; Gopnik 1993). Grasping an appropriate theory about belief (i.e., a theory that allows for misrepresentation in self and others) allows children to succeed on false belief tasks, and to form accurate appearance reality judgments; similarly, having a theory about the perceptual origin of knowledge acquisition is a precondition for developing an episodic memory. ii. Self-ascribing mental states crucially involves an innate modular ability to decouple mental contents from their corresponding attitudes. (Modular theory, Leslie 1987). An innate domain-specic theory of mind mechanism (TOMM) makes available to the child a data-structure, M-representation, whose function is to represent mental states in self and others. 2 According to the second hypothesis, the capacity to self-ascribe thoughts is a precondition for the capacity to ascribe thoughts to others. Reading others minds involves a disposition to form pretend beliefs and desires or emotions associated with a given situation, through which an attributor can simulate in her own mind the attributees putative states. The pretend states are fed into a decision-making mechanism, whose outcome is then projected as being the attributees decision. Simulation theory (Goldman 2006) differs from 1.i-theories in rejecting the need for a folk theory to conduct mindreading, and it differs both from 1.i- and 1.ii-theories in extending the domain of mental states to non-attitudinal states such as proprioceptive states and emotions. It does acknowledge, however, that the agents must have mental categories for typing their own attitudes. As a result, this account takes projection to be a metarepresentational process that qualies a mental state in terms of its type and content. (Goldman 2006: 187).
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3 A third hypothesis opens up an interesting connection between a mindreading and a procedural view of metacognition. This view, called the executive theory of mindreading, (Frye et al. 1995; Russell 1996), claims that rst- and third-person types of mental ascription essentially depend on a common factor, namely the ability to maintain a superordinate rule in working memory (e.g., in this particular case, do not treat this representation as true). On this view, younger children fail to attribute false beliefs to others because of their inability to inhibit what they believe to be the case, rather than because they have a conceptual decit. For the same reason, they also fail to recognize their own past false beliefs: they are not able to decouple the beliefs they currently have from the beliefs they used to have. Executive theorists accept that self- and other- mental state ascription requires applying metarepresentations. What is metarepresented, however, is not primarily a given mental content, or an attitude, but, rather, a super-ordinate rule that requires inhibition of a prepotent response (Russell 1996). On the executive view, in sharp contrast with the other theories reviewed above, the ability to use conceptual metarepresentations derives from higher-order control processes, rather than conversely. A second difference is that dependence on embedded rules applies, beyond mindreading, to all kinds of counterfactual reasoning relevant to the control of ones actions.
1.3.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE CONTRIBUTES TO CONTROL AND REGULATION OF ONES OWN THINKING

All the SAV accounts accept that metacognition necessarily involves self-ascription, which in turn requires metarepresentation of rst-order mental contents. (As we saw, they differ on how a metarepresentational capacity develops and on what its rst-order contents have to be). Another point of relative convergence concerns the causal involvement of selfascription in controlling ones thinking processes. Most SAV theorists recognize that metarepresenting states is a key to thought control (most notably: Shallice 1988; Perner and Lang 1999). Keeping a metarepresentation of ones intention or belief active in ones working memory enhances ones executive capacities: metarepresenting intentions and beliefs allow an agent to resist interference from the environment and to pursue endogeneous goals. Reciprocally, some have also contended that an ability to resist distractors an executive capacity also forms a precondition for decoupling mental states in metarepresentations: in this bi-directional hypothesis, both a metarepresentational and an adequate executive capacity are involved in self- and other-ascription of mental states (Surian and Leslie 1999).
1.4.
INTROSPECTION ENABLES SELF-DIRECTED MINDREADING TO ACCESS INFORMATION ABOUT ONES

OWN MENTAL STATES THAT IS NOT AVAILABLE TO OTHERS. INFORMATION SO ACQUIRED, HOWEVER, CAN IN PRINCIPLE BE GENERALIZED TO THE CASE OF OTHER MINDS

Although SAV theorists have various views on how introspection develops, and on its role in understanding others, they agree that information relative to ones attitudes and mental actions can, in principle, be used to interpret, predict, or explain others attitudes and mental actions. Let us illustrate this claim. Imagine that a subject is asked to memorize in a self-paced way pairs of unrelated words in a list. From a SAV viewpoint, performing this mental task should make available to an agent sensory or quasi-sensory states that are globally broadcast to all its cognitive subsystems, and that enable it to conceptually recognize the mental attitudes and dispositions involved (Carruthers 2009). These concepts can then be used to predict others attitudes or performances in similar tasks.
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Various reasons have recently surfaced, however, for resisting SAV. 2. Why metacognition does not need to involve self-ascription of mental states The difculties for an account of metacognition along SAV lines will be discussed in the order of the claims presented above (1.11.4). These difculties all derive from the assumption made by SAV that representing ones mental contents is a necessary condition for controlling ones thoughts and intentions.
2.1.
SELF-ASCRIPTION VERSUS SELF-EVALUATION

Philosophers of mind have emphasized that self-knowledge is not merely a matter of describing ones psychological states, of nding out what ones thought contents and propositional attitudes are on the model of how we acquire knowledge about other minds. It is associated, rather, with the normative awareness that one is committed to the truth of ones beliefs, to the rationality of ones intentional actions, etc. (Moran 2001). Against 1.1, one may object that construing self-knowledge as based on a descriptive selfascription of mental states may well characterize one possible function of self-knowledge as a self-narrative; but it does not account, in any straightforward, intelligible way, for the evaluative function of metacognition. A consequence of this view is that a distinctively procedural, engaged, and immersed approach to self-knowledge is needed in addition to a theory-laden, descriptive, detached conception such as SAV. A comparison may be helpful to pinpoint the differences. Selfattributing a bodily-agentive property consists in asserting that one possesses a long-term disposition, such as being a fast runner. In procedural forms of agentive control, however, such self-attributions are not sufcient. The agent, rather, needs to know, for instance, whether she now is able to run fast enough to escape the bear, or should choose another option. What holds for meta-action (i.e., bodily action control) also holds for metacognition (i.e., mental action control). Self-attribution of long-term dispositions can have a motivating or discouraging inuence on forming intentions to act, and can help us rationalize our strategic choices to others. Metacognitive self-evaluation, however, is a matter of deciding how to mentally act here and now, based on an evaluation of ones current mental dispositions, given ones commitment to various epistemic requirements. It is also a matter of post facto evaluation of how one did in a particular case. The function of self-evaluation is thus practical and normative: it allows us, in a given case, to predict whether a given mental task can be, or determine whether it has been, successfully completed (Proust 2007).
2.2.
METACOGNITION AS A SELF-EVALUATION PROCESS DOES NOT REQUIRE METAREPRESENTATION

A powerful argument against both views 1.1 and 1.2 comes from comparative psychology. Various non-human species that are not adapted to read minds, such as bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), and rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), are able to evaluate whether they are able to discriminate two visual stimuli, or to make a prospective judgment of memory in a serial probe recognition task (Hampton 2001; Smith et al. 2003). In such cases, the animals are offered the opportunity to opt out from a perceptual or memory task when they feel unable to perform it. In these tasks, their response pattern strikingly resembles that of human subjects. These experiments, carefully controlled for potential confounds (cf. Beran et al. 2009), suggest that metacognition is a specic adapta 2010 The Author Philosophy Compass 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Philosophy Compass 5/11 (2010): 989998, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00340.x

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tion; its phylogenetic distribution overlaps, but does not coincide, with the ability to read minds (a uniquely human ability).
2.3.
SELF-ASCRIPTION OF MENTAL STATES IS NEITHER NECESSARY NOR SUFFICIENT FOR CONTROL

OF ONES MENTAL STATES

As a consequence of 2.2, it is clear that self-ascription of mental states does not need to be present for an animal to control at least some of its cognitive states. It is not necessary, because certain systems that are unable to metarepresent their own mental states are able to evaluate their ability to perform a mental task, to judge when it is appropriate to look for information, or to judge when to trust their own memory. It is not sufcient either: a system able to correctly metarepresent its own mental states, is not ipso facto able to use this metarepresentational information to make appropriate self-evaluations and or control decisions. A new area of research is currently developing aimed at determining the informational sources used by agents to make appropriate self-evaluations and convert them into appropriate epistemic decisions (Alter and Oppenheimer 2009; Koriat and Ackerman 2010).
2.4.
TRANSFERRING KNOWLEDGE FROM SELF- TO OTHER-EVALUATION: A COMPLEX PROBLEM

According to 1.4, the same informational processes are involved in self- and other-mental attribution. Therefore knowledge made available to oneself through introspection should be automatically transferred to others. In the learning task presented above, where subjects are asked to memorize pairs of unrelated words, this prediction seems prima facie to be correct: when forming judgments of learning for others, subjects who have already performed the task transfer to the case of other learners the Memorizing Effort heuristic that more study time predicts less recall (Koriat and Ackerman 2010). This prediction, when made by a SAV theorist, however, depends on the further premise that mindreading is a precondition for controlling ones learning. This view is disconrmed: when predicting others ability before performing the task, the subjects rely on a piece of (wrong) folk-theorizing, namely, that more study time predicts more recall. This is not the rule they follow while learning. There is thus an independent informational source, that may remain implicit, that guides agents in their temporal distribution of learning effort. An experience of active control of learning an idiosyncratic interaction between the learner and the items to be learned is required for subjects to form the correct association between study time and successful retrieval. Transfer to others, however, depends on having conceptually represented this regularity an ability that fails to be available to non-linguistic animals. Transfer thus might well require mindreading as an additional step. 3. The Self-Evaluative View (SEV) The rst section exposed the classical view of metacognition according to which metacognition essentially consists in self-ascribing thoughts on the basis of mental concepts, which are either made available by a mindreading mechanism or through some simulation-based recognitional mechanism. Section 2 offered empirical and conceptual reasons for resisting SAV. Granting that these objections are sound, this third section will draw on existing empirical and conceptual work to sketch an alternative view, stemming from the claim that metacognition essentially consists in a capacity for cognitive self-evaluation
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(SEV). The conditions of adequacy of a proposal of this kind emerge from the discussion in section 2. First, metacognition needs to be redened in a way that accounts for the various contrastive features distinguishing self-evaluation and self-directed mindreading that were emphasized above. Second, its functional articulation with other capacities, such as the disposition to form self-ascriptions and other attitudes, needs to be specied.
3.1.
METACOGNITION CONSISTS IN THE EVALUATION OF ONES COGNITIVE DISPOSITIONS

Why should one evaluate ones own thinking? It seems quite obvious that we need to adjust our cognitive goals and effortful activity to our cognitive resources. Early work on metacognition (understood at the time in the more limited sense of metamemory) has proposed that prediction of future ability requires a two-level cognitive mechanism. A metalevel contains a dynamic model (e.g., a mental simulation) of the object level (Nelson and Narens 1992). The metalevel is seen as a control level: it promotes commands for the initiation, continuation, and termination of epistemic actions (such as controlled remembering). The object level, on the other hand, informs the control level by sending it feedback from its commands, i.e., by monitoring them. This general schema is helpful in contrasting a command level, which has a world-to-mind direction of t (because it aims at producing an outcome in the world, such as naming an individual person), with an observation level, which has a mind-to-world direction of t (because it registers the responses that are actually produced as a consequence of the commands). Granting, however, that the notion of metalevel should not be cashed out in metarepresentational terms (see 2.2), an alternative construal of the relation between control and monitoring must be provided.
3.2.
EVALUATION AND ACTION

A natural suggestion is that the relation of control and monitoring can be explained on the model of the relations between bodily and mental actions and the corresponding forms of awareness. On the basis of her having control over her actions, an agent authoritatively and immediately knows what she is trying to do, and how the movements of her body are the result of an evaluation of the ways she might have moved it (OBrien 2007: 188). Similarly for her mental acts: controlling her thoughts allows an agent to both evaluate her own mental acts, and to gain a primitive form of self-knowledge as a mental agent (Peacocke 2007). Receiving feedback from ones actions has a quasi-observational nature. Such feedback is evaluative because its function is to represent the distance between the desired and the observed outcomes of the command. Therefore, the dual direction of t is a direct consequence of the evaluative function of action feedback.
3.3.
DOES METACOGNITION DIFFER FROM THE CONTROL OF ACTION?

If any action has a control structure, it might be considered arbitrary to provide metacognition with a separate treatment. There is, indeed, an apparent symmetry between judgments such as (1) and (2): (1) This weight is too heavy for me to lift. (bodily ability) (2) This math problem is too difcult for me to solve. (mental ability). Such symmetry might suggest that there is no deep contrast between types of agentive monitoring. Why should we not instead take metacognition to refer to agentive self-evaluation in general?
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One should observe, rst, that the two forms of self-evaluation result from different selective pressures. Some non-human species such as pigeons or capuchin monkeys are able to anticipate their bodily dispositions, but are unable to anticipate their mental dispositions. Second, the sets of norms that respectively govern (1) and (2) overlap, but are not the same. Just as bodily actions, mental actions aim at changing the world by using certain means-to-end relations (captured in instrumental beliefs and know-how, for example: concentrating helps remembering). They differ, however, in their respective constitutive norms (those norms that make them the actions they are supposed to be). A bodily action is constituted by an intention to act, and by the availability (in principle) of an energy transfer sufcient to bring about the intended change. A mental action, by contrast, also involves epistemic requirements; e.g., an attempt to retrieve a name is an attempt to produce a correct outcome. Meta-action processes have the function of comparing world and bodily cues to evaluate the degree of successful development of the corresponding intention. Metacognitive processes, on the other hand, specialize in sensitivity to epistemic normative requirements associated with the corresponding intentions to act (Proust Forthcoming).
3.4.
HOW IS EPISTEMIC NORM SENSITIVITY REPRESENTED IN METACOGNITION?

According to 3.1, a main function of metacognition consists in the evaluation of ones mental dispositions and attitudes in a context-sensitive way. 3.2 and 3.3 established that this normative appreciation is a necessary ingredient in mental actions. 3.4 aims to identify the representational medium in which such appreciations can be made. Christopher Hookway (2003) has convincingly argued that affective states sentiments and emotional responses (feelings of doubt, or of conviction) have an essential role in our practice of epistemic evaluation. They reect unarticulated standards of evaluation, provide patterns of salience, and appropriately motivate our epistemic decisions processes. Several views are possible to explain how affective states relate to epistemic decisions. Granting that emotional states are propositional attitudes (De Sousa 1987) (even though their informational content is often less than fully articulated), they might directly motivate and cause an epistemic decision. For example, a feeling of knowing the response to question Q would motivate and cause one to try to retrieve the response to Q. An alternative view would be that emotions motivate a judgment of knowing, integrating various other informational sources, which then would contribute to form a distinctive epistemic decision. A third possibility is that the affective process includes two steps whose junction constitutes a conscious feeling. The rst step consists in activation of an unconscious heuristic: various cues selected as predictive of success or failure for a given mental action generate the associated feeling of knowing (or familiarity, or doubt). The second step uses this feeling as a source of information for making an explicit, conscious, epistemic decision (Koriat and Levy-Sadot 1999). These three models of emotion-based epistemic decision-making can be made compatible with recognition of the existence of non-human metacognition. It can be speculated that macaques rely on feelings when forming the decision to select a task on the basis of their memory of the associated stimulus. Feelings could express in a graded way how an underlying belief state is likely to satisfy the normative requirements for the associated mental action, without the animals needing to metarepresent the fact, e.g., that they are trying to remember. The feeling of knowing might merely express the likelihood of success of the corresponding mental action of remembering. Note that the representational relation of F expressing S means that F has a de re relation to S (Gibbard 1990). Thus the
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mental state of a feeling of knowing P does not need to access P, nor does it need to have a propositional content representing P (otherwise, such a state would amount to knowing not only that one knows, but what one knows). In the expressive view, the informational content of the feeling is not knowing that one knows that P as a SAV theory would claim, but rather predicting (or affording) success in an action sequence AS, where a mental action is objectively part of that sequence (without needing to be represented as mental). The expressive view thus explains how agents unable to refer to their mental states de dicto can still express them de re, through specialized non-conceptual contents of an emotional kind. A non-human can thus reliably form a feeling of knowing expressing its disposition to handle a memory task, and predict what, in propositional terms, we would describe as having a good chance of success in retrieving a knowledge item from memory, without having to represent to itself that it is engaged in a memory task, nor what a good chance means in terms of probability theory. These models also accommodate the exclusively human capacity to overrule the motivations to act that the feelings provide, when it is rational to do so: for example, when these feelings have proven unreliable in given conditions.
3.5.
CAN METACOGNITIVE STATES BE GENERALIZED TO EVALUATE OTHERS ACTIONS?

As was already suggested in section 2.4, transfer to others of experience-based metacognition only occurs when additional conditions are met. In a model of the second type above, metacognitive feelings experienced by humans provide them access to facts about their own attitudes and commitments (Elgin 1996). Granting that adult humans can articulate these facts in a propositional way (e.g., I feel that I know the answer to this question), emotional states become accessible to the agents self-interpretive activity as a mindreader. Knowledge so gained, as well as knowledge acquired about others mental regularities, is now available to guide mental actions, and to counteract the inuence of experience-based metacognition when the latter is unreliable. The burden on SEV theorists, however, is to explain how metarepresentations can supplement, enrich, or, in certain cases, contradict or modulate emotion-based metacognition. Research on reasoning offers a plausible hypothesis. According to the inuential DualProcess theory of reasoning, there are two systems that can be at work in reasoning. System 1 is constituted by quick, associative, automatic, parallel, effortless, and largely unconscious heuristics (such as the availability heuristic, used to assess the likelihood of an event from the ease with which it can be called to mind). System 2 encompasses slow, analytic, controlled, sequential, effortful, and mainly conscious processes (Stanovich and West 2000). Metacognition might similarly depend on two such systems. Noetic feelings might be an expression of System 1 activation. They are hypothesized to be the subjective, emotional correlates of subpersonal features such as neural latency, intensity, and stability. When they are inuenced by parameters objectively involved in the processes responsible for cognitive performance, as in the Memorizing Effort Heuristic, (discussed above in 2.4), they result in valid metacognitive judgments. If they are based on inappropriate heuristics, however, they result in metacognitive illusions (Whittlesea 1993). In such cases, System 2s controlled processing might step in, as it is supposed to serve to decontextualise and depersonalize problems (Stanovich and West 2000: 659). Its metacognitive role might be to provide corrective inferences about ones current abilities, based on conceptual knowledge about mental facts. The dual-process view, at this stage, remains a speculation, because the mechanisms involved in reasoning are not yet known.
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Acknowledgements I thank an anonymous reviewer for useful critical observations on a prior draft. I am also very grateful to Dick Carter and Tim Bayne for valuable critical comments, as well as for editorial and linguistic advice. Short Biography Joelle Proust works at Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, as a CNRS Director of Research. Her current research lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and epistemology. She has authored or co-authored papers in these areas for Erkenntnis, Synthese, Consciousness and Cognition, Philosophical Topics, Cognition, The Oxford Companion to the Affective Sciences, the Companion to the Philosophy of Action, and The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Her personal books are devoted to animal cognition, and to the structure of action awareness. She also (co)edited a number of collective books, including Simulation and Understanding of Action, 2002 (with J. Dokic) and the philosophical section of the Dictionary of Cognitive Science (2003), also published in French (1998), Italian (2000) and Spanish (2003). Her recent work explores the nature of metacognition both from a conceptual and an empirical viewpoint. From 2006 to 2009, she has been a principal investigator in an interdisciplinary ESF research program on metacognition as a precursor of self-consciousness. Note
* Correspondence: Department of Cognitive Science, Institut Jean-Nicod, Ecole Normale Superieure, 29 rue dUlm, 75005 Paris, France. Email: jproust@ehess.fr.

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