Dictionary

cognite en · VERB

Pronunciation

• /ˈkɑɡnaɪt/ (General-American)

Etymology

Back-formation from cognition.

Meanings

1. (intransitive) To become aware, or think so as to become aware, of some fundamental truth.
   • Unlike psychoanalysis or psychiatry, the person (auditor) treating another person never evaluates for them. The processes used are intended to allow the person to cognite on his sins or wrongdoings and change his ways. 1963 February 11, C. C. Morley, “[Letter to Edward V. Long]”, in Invasions of Privacy (Government Agencies): Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure […] United States Senate, Eighty-Ninth Congress, First Session […], volume 2, published 1965, page 794:
   • I abruptly cognited that "Have You Lived Before this Life?" was our first new book in two years. 1959 April 27, L. Ron Hubbard, “HCO Policy Letter of 27 April 1959: Why New Books Are Few”, in The Organization Executive Course: An Encyclopedia of Scientology Policy, volume 2, published 1974, →ISBN, page 21:
   • One requirement, before a preclear can advance beyond a particular level, is that he should "cognite" on everything scientological up to that stage, and a failure to satisfy the organization that one has a reality on all relevant scientology theory to that stage delays the issue of the HPA certificate. 1965, Kevin Victor Anderson, Report of the Board of Inquiry Into Scientology, page 82; republished as “Chapter 12: The Teaching of Scientology”, in Martin Poulter, editor, The Anderson Report, 1997:
2. (ambitransitive, nonce-word) To think or cogitate (about).
   • Behavior is patterned, but any pattern of behavior is only an abstraction from actual unique sequences of behavior. Society, culture, and personality are merely three different ways of perceiving, cogniting, and organizing these patterns. 1971, Morse Peckham, Art and Pornography: An Experiment in Explanation, →ISBN, page 250:
   • Matter, however, can by definition not be cognited – if cognition is, as Aristotle thought, an assimilatory process of “knowing the same by the same,” an identity of the form of the mind with that of the object cognited. 2005, Amos Funkenstein, “The Revival of Aristotle’s Nature”, in Martin R. Jones, Nancy Cartwright, editors, Idealization XII: Correcting the Model, →ISBN, page 49:
   • […] thus the task of the investigator of cognition is to cognite about the hidden cognitive structure of his subject. 1974, Uriel G. Foa, Edna B. Foa, Societal Structures of the Mind, →ISBN, page 16:

Forms