Cognition from a semiotic point of view
pp. 21-28
in: John Deely, Margot D. Lenhart (eds), Semiotics 1981, Berlin, Springer, 1983Abstract
"Cognition," knowing in the widest sense of the term, as including all processes of awareness by which experience is built up, is the term used traditionally to designate those aspects or elements of experience which are distinguished from the dimension of appetition, the observable tendencies of entities to locate, move, or interact in whatever ways, both independently of cognition (natural appetite) and dependently upon it (elicited appetite: feeling, desire, will). As such, cognition not only can be considered from a semiotic point of view, but must be so considered if we are to arrive at an adequate understanding of what is proper to it, inasmuch as it is equivalent to a process of communication by signs, or semiosis.