Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the relation between perception and cognition by taking into the experience of dance, and develops a theory of perception that uses dance to illustrate the fact that there are cognitive processes that occur before conscious awareness of the perceptual experience itself. It discusses the Aristotelian notion of mental capacities in cognitive systems, drawing on the fact that contemporary scientific research routinely employs the notion of capacity in analyses of cognitive functions. The book proposes the individual’s varying awarenesses of objective referents in, on the one hand, immediate sense experience, and, on the other, reflective senses. It presents a distinction between thought-tokens and thought, where the latter is attributed to a linguistic sentence with standard contents; it is a many–one relationship.