Concept
Cognition
Overview
Cognition encompasses mental processes that deal with knowledge. It includes psychological activities that acquire, store, retrieve, transform, or apply information. Cognitive processes are a fundamental part of mental life, helping individuals understand and interact with the world.
Cognitive processes are typically categorized by their function. Perception organizes and interprets sensory information, such as light and sound, to construct a coherent experience of objects and events. Attention prioritizes specific aspects while filtering out irrelevant information. Memory is the ability to retain, store, and retrieve information, including working memory and long-term memory. Thinking encompasses psychological activities in which concepts, ideas, and mental representations are considered and manipulated. It includes reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and decision-making. Many cognitive activities deal with language, including language acquisition, comprehension, and production. Metacognitive processes deal with information about other mental processes, such as knowing that one can recall a specific memory. Classifications also distinguish between conscious and unconscious processes and between controlled and automatic ones.
There are many theories of the nature of cognition. Classical computationalism posits that cognitive processes manipulate symbols according to formal rules, similar to how computers execute algorithms. Connectionism models the mind as a complex network of nodes where information flows as they communicate with each other. Representationalism and anti-representationalism disagree about whether cognitive processes operate on internal representations of the world.
Many disciplines explore cognition, including psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. They examine different levels of abstraction and employ distinct methods of inquiry. Some scientists study cognitive development, investigating how mental abilities grow from infancy through adulthood. While cognitive research mostly focuses on humans, it also explores how other animals acquire knowledge and how artificial systems can emulate cognitive processes. The study of cognition has its roots in antiquity and has gained particular interdisciplinary prominence since the cognitive revolution starting in the 1950s.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Cognition is discussed.
Whatever may be the content of our cognition, and in whatever manner our cognition may be related to its object, the universal, although only negative conditions of all our judgements is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgements are in themselves (even without respect to the object) nothing. But although there may exist no contradiction in our judgement, it may nevertheless connect…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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But with neither brains nor souls has this essay any business to transact. In it we shall simply assume that cognition IS produced, somehow, and limit ourselves to asking what elements it contains, what factors it implies. Cognition is a function of consciousness. The first factor it implies is therefore a state of consciousness wherein the cognition shall take place.
William James, The Meaning of Truth
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Such a co-operation of assimilations and complications is seen in the most striking manner in those processes of association which in ordinary life are called "recognitions," or, if the scope of the region of association over which the recognition stretches is indefinitely larger, are called "cognitions." We recognise, for example, an acquaintance, whom we have not seen for a long time. We know a table as a table…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
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If the concept of an object is given, the business of the Judgement in the use of the concept for cognition consists in _presentation_ (_exhibitio_), _i.e._ in setting a corresponding intuition beside the concept.
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
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Both the successive mental states, and the successive relations which they bear to each other, must be classified; and classification involves not only a parting of the unlike, but also a binding together of the like. In brief, a true cognition is possible only through an accompanying recognition. Should it be objected that if so, there cannot be a first cognition, and hence there can be no cognition; the reply is…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
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Philosophers who discussed Cognition
- Gilbert Ryle
- Bernard Lonergan
- John Stuart Mill
- John Locke
- Friedrich Schleiermacher
- George Santayana
- Marshall McLuhan
- Noam Chomsky
- David Chalmers
- Baruch Spinoza
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Paul Thagard
- Paul Ricœur
- Richard Boyd
- Ernst Cassirer
- Language of thought hypothesis
- Andy Clark
- Jean Piaget
- Hubert Dreyfus
- Juan Luis Vives
- Nikolay Lossky
- Leonardo Polo
- John F. X. Knasas
Related ideas
- Category (Kant)
- Buddhi
- Empiricism
- Emotion
- Mind–body problem
- Avicenna
- Artificial intelligence
- Ancient philosophy
- American Sign Language
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Grammar
- Innatism
- Philosophy
- Herbert A. Simon
- Creativity
- Word
- Immanuel Kant
- Problem solving
- Vedas
- Japanese language
- John Locke
- Idea
- Feeling
- Knowledge representation and reasoning
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Absurdism.