COGNITION means "knowing," in the widest sense of the term. In psychology it is used to denote one of the three ultimate functions or processes of consciousness, the other being feeling and conation (or willing). Cognition includes every mental proc ess that can be described as an experience of knowing as dis tinguished from an experience of feeling or of willing; it includes, in short, all process of consciousness by which knowledge is built up. In its most familiar and fully developed form it is known as judgment, in which a certain object (known logically and gram matically as a "subject") is discriminated from other objects and characterized by some concept or concepts. Although cognition is readily distinguishable from feeling and conation, yet in the actual flow of mental life the three types of experience are always found together, not separate, but one of them is usually pre dominant in one total experience, another in another, and this fact facilitates their mutual discrimination. Psychology, as a descriptive science, is not concerned with the epistemological question, how external objects can be revealed in subjective experiences; it simply takes at their face value these cognitive experiences in which objects appear to be known somehow, and leaves the critical problems to epistemology and logic.
See PSYCHOLOGY, and THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, and authorities there quoted.