The comments in section 2.2 of my reviewer's contribution are presented as an alternative approach to my own view, but I find myself in agreement with most of the claims, in particular with the remarks on p. 6 concerning the relations between feelings and conceptual representations. The main point concerns how one's own goal, when acting, may influence the production of particular feelings. I discuss this issue at length in sections 5 and 6 of the article under review (Proust this collection), as well as in a recent publication devoted to action representations (Proust 2014). My position is captured by two claims. 1) Feelings – affordance sensings - can be, and indeed are usually triggered while performing a task that has been defined in conceptual terms. Cognitive affordances, in particular, are important relational properties that an agent needs to use when attempting to solve highly complex problems, for example when playing chess or looking for a mathematical proof. 2) The feeling episode, however, has an exclusively evaluative, non-conceptual content. I am aware that these two claims may easily be misunderstood. To disentangle the two, think of what agents mean to do: they mean to play chess according to the rules, or to prove a theorem. These goals, indeed, are conceptually represented, and depend on background beliefs and a sensitivity to epistemic norms such as truth and coherence, which presupposes in these particular cases an ability to represent beliefs as beliefs. Feelings of knowing, feelings of being right, and other affordance sensings are generated while the agents are conducting these higher-level forms of reasoning. They are dependent on the mental and neural activity which is thereby elicited. In other words, these feelings do not result from a consideration of the concepts involved, but from the dynamic features of the underlying processes. Hence, I would go farther than my reviewer, when she claims that noetic feelings are often elicited when concepts are automatically activated when forming a cognitive goal: they are also elicited when concepts are activated in a controlled way, e.g., in the process of planning what to do.
Should we conclude from this claim that heuristic processes are “contaminated by background knowledge” (Pliushch this collection, p. 6)? No. One should rather conclude that while the goal of a mental action is conceptually defined, the feelings entertained while acting are generated not by the concepts themselves, but by the dynamic characteristics of the processes underlying concept use. It is thus perfectly coherent to conclude that feelings have their own representational format that is not itself “infected” by concepts. A "theory of the task" is not a constituent of an affordance sensing, it is only a precondition for evaluating one's ability in solving a task.