Monitoring without metacognition.
Smith et al. present us with a false dichotomy in explaining their uncertainty data: Either the animals' responses are "under the associative control of stimulus cues," or the animals must be responding "under the metacognitive control of uncertainty cues." There is a third alternative to consider: one that is genuinely cognitive, neither associative nor stimulus driven, but purely first-order in character. On this alternative the metacognitive reports of humans in these situations reflect states that are interpretative rather than causal in character.
Carruthers
Peter
P
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 pcarruth@umd.edu http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/people/faculty/pcarruthers/