ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the question on the developmental emergence of knowledge in characteristically destructive philosophical mode: the first step is to see why Conjecture O does not quite explain what it is supposed to explain. It explores one way to fill the resulting explanatory gap by invoking something called metacognitive feelings. Neither the feeling of familiarity nor the sensations associated with electric current involve standing in any intentional relation to the properties of familiarity or electricity. But they are things that adults can, and often do, interpret as being informative about familiarity and electricity. The chapter suggests that this is true of metacognitive feelings generally: Metacognitive feelings are, or involve, aspects of the overall phenomenal character of experiences which their subjects take to be informative about things that are only distantly related to the things that those experiences intentionally relate the subject to.
