ABSTRACT
The concept of cognition has always had a central position in psychology and not least in relation to the psychology of learning. Cognition is a broad term including everything that has to do with knowledge, thinking, reason and understanding, and is traditionally placed in opposition to the other elements of the mind: the affective, which has to do with feelings and emotions, and the conative, which has to do with volition (e.g. Hilgard, 1980). Linguistically the word comes from the Latin, cognitus, which means knowledge in a broad sense. Thus,
the famous statement by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1660), cogito, ergo sum (1967 [1637]), is usually translated into ‘I think, therefore I am’. But this translation has often been disputed and, according to the well-known Norwegian historian of philosophy Arne Næss (1912-2009), cogito in this connection rather means ‘I experience’ or ‘I am somewhat aware’ (Næss, 1963 [1962]: 143). This is not unimportant in the present connection, partly because it indicates that cognition in relation to learning can be much more than just the acquisition of knowledge – in modern terms it is ultimately about making meaning of what we experience (Bruner, 1990; Mezirow, 2000), and partly because the statement of Descartes is often regarded as the foundation of the separation between the mental and the bodily, which for centuries has been so significant in Western philosophy and mentality and has, among many other things, derailed and confused the basic understanding of human learning by also separating the cognitive from the social and the emotional. I shall return to this in the following. As to the understanding of ‘learning’, there are also many and widely differing understandings. I shall
here stick to the very comprehensive definition that learning is ‘any process that in living organisms leads to permanent capacity change and which is not solely due to biological maturation or ageing’ (Illeris, 2007: 3). This implies, among other things, that such processes as socialization, qualification, competence development and therapy are regarded as special types of learning processes or as special angles for perceiving learning.
