“Feeling” denotes a reactive, subjective experience with a distinctive embodied phenomenal quality and a formal object, which may or may not coincide with embodied experience. Feelings typically express affect and valence in sensation. “Reactive” means that feelings are closely associated with an appraisal of a present property or event. The term “reactive” is crucial. The term “feeling” is sometimes used to refer to a non-reactive, perceptual experience. For example, when one perceives an object through touch, it is common to say that “one feels one’s key in one’s pocket”. But “feeling”, in this context, does not refer to a reactive phenomenon. It rather refers to the feedback of one’s own key-touching activity. This type of perceptual feeling is expected to result from one’s action and, hence, does not belong to the domain of reactive feelings. What is called the “formal object” (see Kenny 1963) of a feeling is the property in the triggering event that elicits the reactive feeling. For example, the formal object of fear is some threatening property detected in the perceptual field.
Feelings can be pleasant or aversive, strong or weak, short-lived or long-lasting, or have an arousing or depressing character. They motivate distinctive dispositions to act, whose urgency is entailed both by the feeling experience and the context in which it is experienced: feeling an intense pain disposes the person to promptly locate and remove the cause of the pain; except, for example, when it is self-inflicted, or when it is part of a ritual.
Most theorists of feelings agree that they are associated with—or, for those who identify emotions with conscious experiences[1] consist of—specialized, internally generated bodily sensations, such as an increase in heart rate, contractions or relaxations of the facial muscles, visceral impressions, tremors or tears, impulses to run away, etc. As will be seen below, some feelings, however, do not express emotions., i.e., they are not affective. A feeling tends to be more explicitly felt as bodily when it has a body-related function; that is, the phenomenology makes the need to be served salient (feeling tired, feeling a pain in the joints) in order to motivate action. In affective feelings, in contrast, the bodily phenomenology tends to recede to the fringe of consciousness (feeling in love with A, feeling angry with B).[2] From this observation, it is easy to infer that types of feelings differ in their respective meanings: they in some sense express what they are about. In affective feelings, an experience of “feeling toward” is supposedly present: the emotion is felt as being about an object, a person, or a situation—the objects, rather than bodily sensations, are the focus of one’s emotional attention. Affective feelings also include mixed cases where one seems to both experience a strong bodily feeling at the same time as the intentional content that this feeling seems to refer to, as when Marcel Proust’s narrator reports experiencing an acute pain in the chest when thinking about his beloved deceased friend, Madame de Guermantes.[3] It is unclear whether metacognitive (also called noetic, or epistemic) feelings are affective or non-affective (see section 6 below). They are experienced while conducting a cognitive task: the agent may find the task easy or difficult, and may anticipate her ability or inability to conduct it. Once the task is completed, the agent may have the feeling of being right, or may have a feeling of uncertainty about the outcome of her endeavour. Take the case of a person who feels unable, presently, to remember what she had for dinner last night. Her feeling of not remembering is correlated with activity in a facial muscle, the corrugator supercilii (Stepper & Strack 1993). Her feeling, however, is not about her disposition to contract or relax this or that muscle, of which she is certainly unaware. It is, rather, about her present disposition to remember what she had for dinner. Epistemic feelings seem to be “feeling-toward” experiences, and have cognitive dispositions or contents as their object.
Descriptive phenomenology, however, does not offer in itself an account of the intentional structure of feelings. We need to understand how feelings in general gain their real or supposed aboutness, and how they relate to action-guidance as a function of context; i.e., we need to provide a functional analysis of feelings. Section 1 will begin to provide such an analysis, and will address a preliminary issue—namely, Do the phenomena that are usually called “feelings” share a property that makes them a natural kind? In section 2, the specific informational structure of feelings will be seen to account for their generic characteristics. Section 3 will clarify the account by way of addressing various objections. Section 4 will attempt to show that the proposed account fares better with experimental evidence than a cognitivist account of affective and metacognitive feelings. Section 5 will examine whether or not metacognitive feelings have an affective valence.