The Phenomenology of Remembering Is an Epistemic Feeling

This philosophical paper proposes that the feeling of pastness in episodic remembering is a form of epistemic feeling, building on psychological research on metacognitive feelings. The authors argue that a feeling-based metacognition is involved in episodic remembering and develop an integrated view that addresses the feeling's status as a feeling, its content, and its relationship to the first-order memories it accompanies. They draw on conceptual and empirical reasons to support treating this phenomenology as an epistemic feeling, offering a new philosophical account of autonoetic consciousness.

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Abstract

This article aims to provide a psychologically informed philosophical account of the phenomenology of episodic remembering. The literature on epistemic or metacognitive feelings has grown considerably in recent years, and there are persuasive reasons, both conceptual and empirical, in favor of the view that the phenomenology of remembering—autonoetic consciousness, as Tulving influentially referred to it, or the feeling of pastness, as we will refer to it here—is an epistemic feeling, but few philosophical treatments of this phenomenology as an epistemic feeling have so far been proposed. Building on insights from the psychological literature, we argue that a form of feeling-based metacognition is involved in episodic remembering and develop an integrated metacognitive feeling-based view that addresses several key aspects of the feeling of pastness, namely, its status as a feeling, its content, and its relationship to the first-order memories the phenomenology of which it provides.