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Review of Philosophy and Psychology

, Volume 4, Issue 1, pp 135–152 | Cite as

Scaffolded Memory and Metacognitive Feelings

  • Santiago Arango-MuñozEmail author
Article
First Online:

Abstract

Recent debates on mental extension and distributed cognition have taught us that environmental resources play an important and often indispensable role in supporting cognitive capacities. In order to clarify how interactions between the mind –particularly memory– and the world take place, this paper presents the “selection problem” and the “endorsement problem” as structural problems arising from such interactions in cases of mental scaffolding. On the one hand, the selection problem arises each time an agent is confronted with a cognitive problem, since she has to choose whether to solve it internally or externally. How does she choose? On the other hand, when confronted with the internally or externally retrieved solution to a cognitive task, the subject has to decide whether to endorse the information. How does the subject decide whether to endorse it or not? The last section proposes a solution to each problem in terms of metamemory and metacognitive feelings. Metamemory evaluates memory each time the subject is confronted with a memory task and elicits either a positive or negative metacognitive feeling that guides the decision.

Keywords

Selection Problem Semantic Memory External Resource Cognitive Problem Internal Memory 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Ken Aizawa, Anne-Sophie Brüggen, Koosha Eghbal, Christoph Michel, Joëlle Proust, Kevin Reuter, Camilo Uribe “el Pájaro”, Tobias Schlicht, Richard Stockle-Schobel, and Eric Schwitzgebel for their corrections, comments, and suggestions. I would specially like to thank the editors John Sutton and Kourken Michaelian, and also to two anonymous reviewers for their thorough corrections, comments, and suggestions to a previous draft. Their suggestions greatly improved this paper.

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© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Institut für Philosophie IIRuhr Universität BochumCologneGermany

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