The dominant picture of cognition in contemporary thought is still representational. Minds are treated as places where the world is re-presented: encoded, modelled, mapped, or symbolised. Cognition, on this view, is an internal activity whose success is measured by how accurately these representations correspond to an external reality.
This series begins by refusing that picture.
Not by denying experience, intelligence, or understanding — but by showing that representation was never doing the explanatory work it claimed to do.
What replaces it is not relativism, constructivism, or idealism, but a more exact claim:
Cognition is participation in a field of potential, not the manipulation of internal representations.
This post establishes that shift.
1. The representational hangover
Representational theories of cognition persist not because they work particularly well, but because they feel intuitive. They inherit a deeply sedimented metaphysical assumption:
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that there is a world “out there”,
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a mind “in here”,
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and cognition is the process of copying the former into the latter.
This assumption quietly structures everything from philosophy of mind to cognitive science, AI research, education theory, and everyday talk of “mental models”.
But it is already unstable.
Representation presupposes:
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a pre-given object,
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a pre-given subject,
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and a neutral mapping relation between them.
None of these survive scrutiny once we take seriously what we have already established about meaning, construal, and cuts.
2. Cognition after the ontology of meaning
In The Ontology of Meaning, meaning was shown not to be a property of symbols, nor a relation of reference, but a first-order phenomenon of construal. There is no meaning that exists prior to or outside participation in a system of potential.
Cognition cannot be exempt from this.
If meaning is not representational, then cognition — insofar as it is meaning-bearing activity — cannot be representational either.
This immediately forces a re-description:
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Cognition does not operate on meanings.
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Cognition is the ongoing actualisation of meaning through constrained participation.
3. Why “the mind” cannot be a container
The container metaphor — the idea that cognition happens inside a bounded individual — depends on individuation doing ontological work. But as the Failure of Individuation series demonstrated, individuation is always retrospective.
There is no ontologically primitive “mind” that then engages with the world.
What we call a mind is:
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a local stabilisation,
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within a collective field of potential,
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under perspectival constraint,
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sustained across repeated cuts.
4. Participation, not processing
To say that cognition is participation is to make a precise claim:
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A cognitive episode is an event of alignment within a system.
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That alignment is constrained by history, capacity, and context.
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What stabilises appears as perception, thought, understanding, or decision.
Nothing here requires representations.
What is required is:
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a field of potential,
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a perspectival position,
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and a cut that actualises one trajectory rather than another.
5. Knowledge without inner pictures
One of the strongest intuitions in favour of representation is the feeling that “knowing” involves having something in mind. But this intuition confuses phenomenology with ontology.
What is phenomenologically present is not a picture of the world, but a stabilised way of going on.
To know is:
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to be oriented appropriately within a field,
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to act, respond, and discriminate reliably,
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to participate competently in ongoing relational dynamics.
And it is maintained not by inner symbols, but by continued alignment within a system of constraints.
6. The quiet consequence
Once cognition is understood as participation:
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The mind/world divide collapses.
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Internal/external distinctions lose their explanatory role.
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Learning ceases to be information transfer.
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Intelligence becomes a property of systems, not individuals.
Most importantly:
Cognition no longer needs representation to explain success, failure, or breakdown.
Those phenomena can now be analysed in terms of misalignment, loss of constraint, or breakdown in participation — a move that will matter enormously in later posts.
7. What follows
This first post makes only one cut, but it is decisive:
Cognition is not the manipulation of representations.It is the constrained participation of a perspectival position within a field of potential.
The next posts will build on this by examining:
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collective cognition and attention,
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symbolic systems as stabilised participation,
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learning as perspectival shift,
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and cognitive breakdown as relational failure rather than internal error.
For now, it is enough to see that once representation is abandoned, cognition does not disappear.
It becomes legible.
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