Knowing and Feeling—Epistemic Feelings in Vocational Decision-Making Processes and Their Integration into an Inferential Taxonomy

Skilful action and decision-making of experts are often intuitive. Such intuitions are not only drawn on an explicit knowledge base. Rather, tacit knowledge is involved, which is used subsidiarily without the subject directing its focal attention to it. This raises the question of how to ensure the validity of intuitive decisions. A solution to this problem can be offered by integrating epistemic feelings into an inferential approach to intuitive decision-making. Epistemic feelings serve to monitor cognitive processes as well as to inform the subject about the outcome quality of cognitive processes. However, the interplay between such feelings and decision-related cognitions is unclear so far. The paper analyses in which ways epistemic feelings contribute to ensuring the validity of intuitive decision processes and provides an integrative approach to how feeling and knowing interact in the course of intuitive processes. As a result, intuitive processes can become fallible, and their investigation can be linked to research on human rationality.