On the Notion of Cognition

Abstract

We discuss philosophical issues concerning the notion of cognition basing ourselves in experimental results in cognitive sciences, especially in computer simulations of cognitive systems. There have been debates on the "proper" approach for studying cognition, but we have realized that all approaches can be in theory equivalent. Different approaches model different properties of cognitive systems from different perspectives, so we can only learn from all of them. We also integrate ideas from several perspectives for enhancing the notion of cognition, such that it can contain other definitions of cognition as special cases. This allows us to propose a simple classification of different types of cognition.