Abstract

What is the representational format for metacognition? This chapter first provides an overview of the philosophical approaches to the notion of representation. A propositional system of representation, its objectivity and generality, is contrasted with a featural system, where these properties are lacking. A feature-placing system represents an environmental affordance as being incidental ‘here’ and ‘now’. A feature-based system represents a knowledge affordance as being incidental ‘now’ in connection to a current task. Both are shown to involve nonconceptual in full autonomy towards conceptual contents. Fluency is shown to be regulating epistemic evaluations in perceptual and memorial tasks in non-humans. The fact that humans are also sensitive to fluency—specifically when the stakes associated with a judgement are not too high—is an important argument in favor of FBS influencing epistemic decision in a ‘System 1’ type of metacognition.