psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

, apprehension (Lat. ''ad'', "to"; ''prehendere'', "to seize") is a term applied to a

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided in ...

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...

in which nothing is affirmed or denied of the object in question, but the

mind The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. It covers the totality of mental phenomena, including both conscious processes, through which an individual is aware of external and internal circumstances ...

is merely aware of ("seizes") it. "Judgment" (says Reid, ed. Hamilton, i. p. 414) "is an act of the mind, specifically different from simple apprehension or the bare conception of a thing". "Simple apprehension or conception can neither be true nor false." This distinction provides for the large class of mental acts in which we are simply aware of, or "take in" a number of familiar objects, about which we in general make no judgment, unless our attention is suddenly called by a new feature. Or again, two alternatives may be apprehended without any resultant judgment as to their respective merits. Similarly, G.F. Stout stated that while we have a very vivid idea of a character or an incident in a work of fiction, we can hardly be said in any real sense to have any belief or to make any judgment as to its existence or truth. With this mental state may be compared the purely

aesthetic Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,'' , acces ...

contemplation of music, wherein apart from, say, a false note, the faculty of judgment is for the time inoperative. To these examples may be added the fact that one can fully understand an argument in all its bearings, without in any way judging its validity. Without going into the question fully, it may be pointed out that the distinction between judgment and apprehension is relative. In every kind of thought, there is judgment of some sort in a greater or less degree of prominence. Judgment and thought are in fact psychologically distinguishable merely as different, though correlative, activities of consciousness. Professor Stout further investigates the phenomena of apprehension, and comes to the conclusion that "it is possible to distinguish and identify a whole without apprehending any of its constituent details." On the other hand, if the attention focuses itself for a time on the apprehended object, there is an expectation that such details will, as it were, emerge into consciousness. Hence, he describes such apprehension as " implicit", and insofar as the implicit apprehension determines the order of such emergence, he describes it as " schematic". A good example of this process is the use of

formula In science, a formula is a concise way of expressing information symbolically, as in a mathematical formula or a ''chemical formula''. The informal use of the term ''formula'' in science refers to the general construct of a relationship betwe ...

e in calculations; ordinarily the formula is used without question; if attention is fixed upon it, the steps by which it is shown to be universally applicable emerge, and the "schema " is complete in detail. With this result may be compared Kant's theory of apprehension as a synthetic act (the "synthesis of apprehension") by which the sensory elements of a

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...

are subjected to the formal conditions of time and space.

References

{{EB1911 article with no significant updates Cognition

See also

References