The Felt Signal: Metacognitive Experience as the Missing Nexus Between Tacit Knowledge, Interoception, and Knowledge Externalization

Metacognitive experience — the family of noetic feelings, online judgments, andprocessing-fluency signals identified by Flavell (1979) and systematized by Efklides (2006)— has been the least theorized component of the metacognitive system. This paper arguesthat it is the most consequential: metacognitive experience constitutes the missing theoreticalnexus among three major traditions that have studied overlapping aspects of human cognitionin isolation. We establish three claims. First, we demonstrate a structural isomorphismbetween Polanyi's (1966) subsidiary awareness and Nelson and Narens' (1990) metacognitivemonitoring, identifying metacognitive experience as the empirical instantiation of Polanyi'stacit integration. Second, we argue that the felt character of metacognitive experience isgrounded in interoceptive processing, showing that Garfinkel et al.'s (2015)three-dimensional model of interoception recapitulates Nelson and Narens' monitoringarchitecture applied to bodily signals. Third, we propose that Nonaka's (1994) externalizationrequires metacognitive experience as a cognitive precondition: the feeling of knowinginitiates articulation, the feeling of difficulty provides corrective feedback, and the feeling ofrightness confirms fidelity to the original tacit knowledge. The resulting framework reframesexternalization as a multi-stage process driven by the metacognitive experience family,explains why externalization is always incomplete, and identifies metacognitive experience asthe interface where tacit knowledge, bodily self-monitoring, and knowledge articulationconverge. We discuss implications for education, knowledge management, and clinicalpsychology, and derive four testable empirical predictions.