How come we "recognise" things without "cognising" them in the first place?

Answer 1

In my opinion, this answer is best viewed through the field of psychology. Beginning with Sigmund Freud, whose many ideas have been influential though very rarely taken as scientific fact nowadays, psychologists have examined the subconscious mind and its abilities. In my collegiate career, classes in political science and psychology have shown examples of "cognition", realized by the conscious mind, after the subconscious had already detected or "recognised" a pattern or idea. There is a fascinating study about subjects being asked to draw cards from two decks, red and blue. Each card drawn would have a positive or negative outcome, in this case monetary with either relative gains or losses. Moreover, the red deck contained a higher percentage of negative outcomes than the blue deck. For whatever reason, arguably the subconscious recognising a pattern in the "pre-cognition" phase, participants would draw statistically less from the red deck before they were able to definitively state that the red decks tended to have worse outcomes. Interestingly, certain drug addicts have been found to have lost the ability to recognise trends and patterns in the "pre-cognition phase. This experiment can be found in the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, and is a very interesting read otherwise. He analyses split decisions and argues that the subconscious mind is able to make good decisions upon instincts, essentially recognition without an elongated cognition phase. I hope this helps...

Answer 2

OK, two answers.

First the short silly one :

Sounds like deja-vu all over again.

Now the longer, hopefully, more sensible one.

We are supremely sensate creatures, that is, after all, mostly why we come into this dense physical realm, to sense.

We do this through all of the physical senses, but not equally, first off we are extremely visual, then sound, smell, touch and so on come into play in lesser proportions. This varies tremendously form individual to individual, but the generalisation holds.

What the mechanical human brain does is to look for known features first, and if none are evident then it moves to the back-up system of similar previous data, does it look like something we've seen before ? Using sometimes the flimsiest of data the mind tries to make sense of what it senses.

This is why we are actually frequently fooled by are visual receptors into thinking we have 'seen' something that isn't actually at all what we think it is. It's also why the legal weight given to 'eye-witnesses' may be one of the most erroneous tenets of the law.

It's also why, in the example of Columbus and his first contact with the Taino 'indians' of my adopted home, was able to appear, apparently out of nowhere. Why ? Because the native people literally had no possible frame of reference for a sea-going vessel of the size of those vessels, and thus could not actually see them at all. It took a while for them to able perceive them as a result of their local effects, rather like the way astronomers can 'see' dark stars now, not by any visble trace, but rather by what they can't see, but should be able to.

There is also an element of what we call 'intuition', but unfortunately the 'science' establishment still refuses to accept the clear evidence that such perceptions, beyond physical sense, exist.

Answer 3

Actually we do. "Cognise" means to know. Remember that new words come into a language as the result of people struggling to express new ideas and thoughts, especially in the early days of language.

Try and put yourself back in those times. If you met someone you had met before, and no word existed to express what went through your mind, how would you describe it? You'd start by using, or adapting, the few words that already existed. Someone must have said, "I knew you before, and now I know you again". (OK, probably not in English.)

Answer 4

my answer is more semantic or linguistic than philosophic. Recognition implies a certain sense of 'I knew it all along'. It's not exactly the same thing as learning something new for the first time.

Recognize comes to English from Latin. It's not the only word that has 're' as a prefix where the word without the prefix is not used or is different. For example I can redeem a hostage without havine 'deemed' him/her in the first place. I can repeat a mistake that I've never peated before. etc.

Answer 5

the first time you ever see something you cognise it.

Every time after that when you see it again you are recognising it, or something very similar to something you cognised in the first place.

Answer 6

We do cognise first. Cognition is unconscious, a brain process. Recognition is a conscious, mental process. ie. you have to see something before you can decide what it is, even if these seem to be simultaneous events, they're not the same process. That's what I think anyway.

Answer 7

I am going to guess at what you are asking. The part of our brain that recognizes faces and objects is attached to but not dependent upon our language centers. Thus we can walk down the road and see a tree, a car, sidewalk, houses, etc., without ever thinking of the words car, tree, etc. Object recognition does not need the language center of the brain. If you had to think of the word for everything you saw, you would go nuts!

Hope that is what you were asking.
j

Answer 8

Quality. We have a natural aptitude for qualifying and quantifying chaotic input, which is how we convert the formless future into the immutable past, filtering the fleeting present moment through the lens of percepton at the cutting edge of our hurtling locomotive.

Answer 9

The answer to this is very philosophical and will very according to each individuals beliefs---it has been argued since the time of the Greeks (and before).

The basic answer is do you believe that we have ingrained knowledge within our minds at the time of birth (this is what Plato believed) or do we learn everything from experience (as empiricists believe).

Personally, I think there are some basic ideas and constructs that ingrained in us from birth while most of what we learn is from experience.

Answer 10

The word cognition means thoughts. When we recognise something it means we see the thing again which we have retained in our thoughts or sub conscious.

There, my psychology lessons do come into use!!!