Abstract

This chapter develops an embodied and embedded account of noetic feelings: experiences of knowing, not knowing, confidence, doubt, and cognitive surprise. It argues that they play a foundational role in the emergence of epistemic agency. Situated between socially scaffolded norm enforcement and explicit metarepresentational reasoning, noetic feelings are characterized as nonconceptual, affectively charged feedback signals that regulate cognition. Drawing on evidence from memory research, judgments of learning, insight problem solving, developmental psychology, and comparative work on uncertainty monitoring, the chapter shows how these signals guide attention, manage cognitive effort, and structure epistemic action. It then introduces the Twin Triviality Problem, which questions whether noetic feelings are either cognitively distinctive or epistemically robust enough to ground cognition about cognition, on the one hand, or normative self-knowledge, on the other. In response, the chapter argues that only strongly embodied noetic feelings, those recruiting brain–body dynamics and becoming socially interpretable, can escape both forms of trivialization.