Moving from constitution to function, this chapter shows how noetic feelings shape cognition. Confidence and doubt act as control parameters for executive functions: they gate attention, modulate working memory, bias retrieval thresholds, and orchestrate exploration versus exploitation in what the book calls epistemic foraging. In developmental and adult cognition, these feelings scaffold learning by calibrating when to persevere, when to seek help, and when to revise or suspend belief. Crucially, their regulative role makes them precursors to epistemic norms: by tracking reliability and expected accuracy, they approximate the capacity to track truth even before explicit concepts of justification are in play. The chapter integrates evidence from metacognitive monitoring tasks, memory judgments, perceptual decision-making, and confidence–accuracy dissociations to argue that noetic feelings constitute the cognitive soil from which epistemic agency grows. In doing so, it bridges the gap between basic self-regulation and socially sustained practices of giving reasons: the same feelings that guide low-level control become, once socially interpreted and disciplined, the felt basis for epistemic accountability. This dual role positions noetic feelings as the hinge between individual regulation and normative evaluation.