Epistemic feelings and thought awareness: a projective view of cognitive phenomenology

Cognitive phenomenology (CP) refers to the experience one has when performing cognitive actions, such as exchanging ideas, planning a trip, trying to remember a name, or solving a problem. It will be argued that CP has two forms, which are determined by two crucial functions of conscious awareness of one's own cognitive actions.  Task-indexing imagery has the function of maintaining executive attention focused on the present informational goal until fully completed. Activity-dependent noetic feelings have the function of evaluating on-line the feasibility and correctness of cognitive actions. Conceptual and empirical arguments in favour of this functional duality of CP will be discussed. A projection theory of the role of sensory information in cognitive phenomenology will be defended. This theory purports to explain why task-indexes and epistemic feelings have a sensory vehicle but are felt as expressing respectively intended goal (e.g. proving that P) and graded epistemic opportunities (feasibility) or outcome properties  (relevance, coherence, truth, etc.).