Concentric spiral of layered pale blue-green forms curving into a centre

Recently a new core word entered SPLectrum: cognition, with a widened definition and constraints removed. As a process it was placed firmly within the seed: the dynamic process that discloses reality to a subject. Beneath both sits a claim that deserves its own ground: cognition is not a secondary process. Nothing is received first and made sense of after. Knowledge and understanding is acquired with the experiencing itself — all in one, not add-on.

The picture being declined is an intuitive one and deserves attention. The world delivers raw material through the senses, there are experiences, there is thought; cognition then comes into action — it sorts it, interprets it, it adds meaning. A sequence of receiving, absorbing and processing. Most textbook diagrams of perception have this shape, and under that interpretation cognition is indeed secondary: important, but downstream.

Within philosophy this picture has been refused by influential philosophers, from several directions at once. One strand of the turn in Western philosophy traced here before, the long letting-go of the outside view, now walked in the key of cognition. Kant made the opening move: intuitions without concepts are blind — the mind’s activity runs in all experience, not after it. The phenomenologists radicalised the point. Heidegger: we are always already in the world, with no moment before meaning. Merleau-Ponty: perception arrives whole and already significant, the body doing the work the textbook assigns to inference. Gadamer: all understanding runs on pre-judgement that tradition delivers — the ground of knowing, not its contamination. And the analytic wing reached the same refusal by its own route: Wittgenstein telling us not to think of understanding as a mental process at all; Ryle showing that the inner-act picture ends in regress; Peirce, earlier than either, dissolving the line between perceiving and inferring.

A third current carried the fusion the whole way. Bergson: there is no perception which is not full of memories — the unloaded percept never occurs. James put the relations inside the stream of experience, given there, not added by an act afterwards. Dewey retired the spectator and made knowing a mode of doing. Whitehead generalised furthest of all: every actual entity takes up its world — experience-like process all the way down, with human cognition an elaborated case of something utterly general.

Nor is the refusal a Western possession. Yogācāra Buddhism analysed experience as arising with no split between grasper and grasped, every perception conditioned by the seeds of past experience. Abhinavagupta’s school held manifestation and awareness strictly inseparable — and named itself, a thousand years ago, the school of recognition. Zhuangzi’s cook cuts the ox with nothing deliberative running behind the knife: the knowing is in the doing. The fusion has been stated in every register philosophy possesses.

SPLectrum’s seed principles place it inside this family by construction. In P2: Language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality there is no pipeline for a secondary process to be a stage of: language, experience and cognition are aspects of one running, and the process runs within the experiencing — no separation, no before. What the family holds, where the resonances lie and where the seed goes further, is gathered point by point in the cognition subject page Cognition in Core Philosophy and in the close-affinity piece on cognition and core philosophy; I decided to create a meta subject on cognition (the SPLectrum definition) so that the different angles on cognition — scattered for historical reasons across science and philosophy — can be brought together over time.

Core, then — not crown. Cognition does not rule experience from somewhere upstream; it runs within it, and was never anywhere else. That is what the widened word was always naming.

This post is part of the positioning series. See also The seed and Cognition.

Photo: Pawel Czerwinski / Unsplash