In his formative book on cognitive psychology, Neisser wrote, “The term ‘cognition’ refers to all processes by which … sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used” ( Neisser, 1967, p. We might not go as far as to call the distinction between affect and cognition a fallacy, but it may be the case that the distinction between the two is rooted in function rather than in nature. There is a risk, he explains, of confusing functional distinctions with ontological ones. The psychologist’s fallacy, Dewey (1894) wrote, “is to confuse the standpoint of the observer and explainer with that of the fact observed” (p.

The purpose of this special issue is to discuss the distinctiveness of affect and cognition, and in this paper we question whether the boundary between the two is given by nature, or whether it is a phenomenological distinction that can, at times, be functional. Cognitions might trigger affective feelings or behaviours, and affect might influence cognitive processes like memory and attention but the two are considered to be separate in some real and fundamental way (what philosophers would call “ontologically” distinct). Many psychologists believe that cognition and affect interact (cf.

Modern psychological science no longer views them as opposing forces within the human mind, but continues to be grounded by the assumption that “thinking” (e.g., sensing and categorising an object, or deliberating on an object) is a fundamentally different sort of psychological activity than “affecting” (i.e., constructing a state to represent how the object affects you). Scholars have long assumed that cognition and affect are separable (and often opposing) mental processes ( Aristotle, 1991 Plato, 1992).

Affect on you