The noetic feeling of confusion

ABSTRACT

Feeling confused can sometimes lead us to give up on a task, frustrated. What is less emphasized is that confusion may also promote happy (epistemic) endings to our inquiries. It has recently been argued that confusion motivates effortful investigative behaviors which can help us acquire hard-to-get epistemic goods. While the motivational power of confusion and its benefits for learning has been uncovered in recent years, the exact nature of the phenomenon remains obscure. In this paper we attempt to shed light on the nature and epistemic value of an experience we are all familiar with: the experience of being confused at an object, a statement, etc. We first review the psychological literature on confusion, where it is most often considered to be an epistemic emotion. We then propose a refined account of confusion, by drawing on the literature on metacognitive or noetic feelings, both in psychology and in the philosophy of mind. Finally we show how our account may explain findings about the role of the experience of confusion in motivating deeper inquiry into complex problems and bringing about epistemic success in these cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Confusion
• emotion
• epistemic emotion
• noetic feeling
• metacognition
• negative affect
• learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This is not to say that the feeling of confusion amounts or is identical with a lack of confidence. Experiences of confusion are likely to impact our level of confidence with regard to our ability to perform the task successfully. However, while levels of confidence amount to an epistemic stance, confusion is an emotional episode with distinct phenomenological features. In the same manner, other epistemic feelings, like feelings of knowing or not knowing, as defined by Koriat (1995, 2000) will inevitably impact one’s level of confidence downstream regarding whether we will retrieve the information as needed. In this sense, such feelings may be exploited as indications and reasons to update one’s level of confidence, i.e., one’s graded epistemic stance on whether we will successfully complete the task or not.

2. While some authors refer to interest and curiosity equally (e.g., Silvia, 2010), recent work (Pekrun, 2021) suggest that both can be conceptualized as a trait and as a state. Here, we are only interested in curiosity as a state, that is, a short-lived emotional episode.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Grant No. 100012_176364).