The Cognitive Sciences

Some dictionaries still define cognition as the power or faculty of apprehending and knowing, a usage that harks back to the days when philosophers attributed all mental phenomena to one of three types od mental faculties: faculties of knowing or conotion, faculties of willing or cognition or conition, and faculties of feeling or affection (Hilgrd, 1980b). When cognition is used as an adjective — cognition anthropology, cognition pyschology, cognition neuroscience — it still presupposes this old dinstinction between the states and process of knowing and any other mental states or processes. Thus, perpection, memory, language, intelligence, and reasining are central concerns of any cognitive, enterprise, whereas such noncognitive states and processes as motivation, intention, feeling, and emotion are not.