Nature of cognitive experience: unity of perception, thinking, body and language

The article analyzes the nature of cognitive experience in the context of non-classical epistemology and critically interprets the dogmatic concept of cognitive process as a special form of reality reflection. Borrowing his arguments from neurobiology, cognitive science and cross-cultural studies, the author makes the following conclusions: the modular architecture of perceptual systems and embodied cognition impose certain restrictions on the way of presenting perceptual data, determining what stimulus diversity should be reduced to in order for it to be perceived and comprehended. At the same time, perception involves cooperation with other cognitive abilities - attention, memory, and thinking. In this regard, the perception of sensory stimuli depends on the subject’s set of categories, anticipatory schemes, and linguistic frameworks. All these means provide procedures for the selection and categorization of information. As a result, sensory data receive objective meanings, and perception turns out to be irreducible to the passive «copying» of reality.