On the present proposal, “feelings” are not isolated sensory events. They are, rather, the ingredients of a nonlinguistic expressive mode that allows organisms to evaluate and predict environmental changes and affordances. This expressive mode is of a relational, intensive kind that is not suitable for a predicative, concept-based representation of the world. As a consequence, feelings are not themselves judgments about the world or about one’s own thoughts. They are not “about” anything in the objective, referring sense of the term. Feelings are able to approximate (in their own mode) the guidance offered by full-blown judgments, and hence can be re-described in conceptual terms when the latter are available to the emoter.
The importance of the duality between an expressive and a propositional system of representation has generally been overlooked. Even dual-processing theorists rarely appreciate that the two systems involved in cognitive evaluation and in reasoning have their own independent, although asymmetrical, role to play. A purely automatic, reactive type of evaluation is possible, and is present in nonhumans and young children. It is prone, however, to generating throughout life illusions of competence and reasoning errors. A conceptually-controlled type of evaluation, on the other hand, can partially inhibit the influence of the expressive system, but it still depends on the latter to weigh the impact of context on ability, and to assess the trade-off between ease of processing and informativeness—that is, relevance—that is crucial in communication and in problem solving.
A major practical consequence of the duality between the two target representational modes concerns pedagogy. Children cannot learn what they are not motivated to learn. Their motivation heavily depends on their subjective experience of what a school context affords them. Their feelings of confidence, i.e., the feedback from the cognitive tasks they engage in, have to be sufficiently positive and appropriately calibrated in order for them to form their own realistic and motivating cognitive goals. No amount of analytic reasoning can replace a positive experience when learning.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Dick Carter, Laurence Conty, Terry Eskenazy, Martin Fortier, Jonathan Frome, Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer Windt for their critical comments. Special thanks to Dick Carter for his linguistic advice, to Tony Marcel, whose critical questions about the commonality between M-feelings and affective feelings inspired the present article, and to Robert Gordon, for giving me access to some of his unpublished writings. This research has been supported by an ERC Senior Grant "Dividnorm" # 269616, and by two institutional grants: ANR-11-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02 PSL.