COGNITIVE PROCESSES: KNOWING, THINKING AND BELIEVING
Cognitive processes are encoded by such stative verbs as believe, doubt, guess, know, recognize, think, forget, mean, remember, understand. A selection of examples is given below. Feel is also regularly used as an equivalent of ‘believe’. Most verbs of cognition have as their Phenomenon a wide range of things apprehended, including human, inanimate and abstract entities encoded as nominal groups (a) and (b). Facts, beliefs, doubts, perceptions and expectations are encoded as finite that-clauses (c) and (f), finite wh-clauses (e), or non-finite clauses.
Many cognitive processes allow the Phenomenon to be unexpressed when this is ‘Given information’, for example I don’t know, Jill doesn’t understand, Nobody will remember.
In the following short extract, the author has chosen processes of cognition, perception, affection and one behavioral to reflect the mental make-up of a meteorologist whose work contributed to chaos theory:
Lorenz enjoyed 1 weather – by no means a prerequisite for a research meteorologist. He savored2 its changeability. He appreciated 3 the patterns that come and go in the atmosphere, families of eddies and cyclones, always obeying mathematical rules, yet never repeating themselves. When he looked4 at clouds he thought 5 he saw 6 a kind of structure in them. Once he had feared 7 that studying the science of weather would be like prying a jack-in-the-box apart with a screwdriver. Now he wondered 8 whether science would be able to penetrate the magic at all. Weather had a flavor that could not be expressed by talking about averages.
(James Gleick, Chaos, Making a New Science)
1affection; 2perception; 3cognition; 4behavioural; 5cognition; 6perception; 7affection; 8cognition
