In this chapter I explore the epistemic aspects of strong experience. I discuss schemata, and how metarepresentation plays an important role in generating certain strong experiences. I seek explanations for the epistemic feelings, including the feeling of strong significance and the feeling of ineffability.

Representations and Metarepresentations

Our thoughts have content, and we have introspective access to that content. In other words, we know what we are thinking about. This makes our thoughts representational, and they are one type of mental representation. Other types of mental representation include perceptions, schemata and so on. The various different kinds of mental representation can be matched to one another if they share content or have the same content; for example a perception of a chair can be matched to a schema for a chair. This is a matching of representations at different levels of generality. The matching of mental representations is important for the present project, because a discrepancy in the matching of mental representations, for example the match between a perception and a schema, can be a trigger of surprise, and hence sometimes of a strong experience.

We can sometimes introspectively examine the content of mental representations, but not always. And we have no introspective access to the structure of mental representations; we cannot introspectively know if they are formed like sentences in the language of thought which Fodor (1975) hypothesises. Similarly, though our memory is partly in the form of schemata, we cannot introspectively examine what a schema is. The same is true of many kinds of mental representation, including for example representations of sound or visual material, which may involve types of representation to which we have no introspective access. And while our ability to speak depends on our having mental representations of linguistic structure, again these are inaccessible to introspection. The same applies to our musical abilities, which depend on representations of musical structure which are themselves inaccessible to introspection. Raffman (1993) uses the term ‘structural ineffability’ to describe our inability to introspectively know about the structure of mental representations.

Metacognition is the ability to have cognition about cognition. This is an ability that may be specific to humans and allows us to think about our own thoughts or other cognitive processes and about other people's thoughts and cognitive processes.