Cognition is often interpreted through concepts derived from human psychology—perception, memory, reasoning, and decision-making. When these concepts are applied across biological systems, two contrasting interpretive tendencies can arise.
One approach understands human cognition as a specialised form of more general biological organisation. On this view, cognitive capacities are grounded in viability-oriented activity through which organisms differentiate and respond to conditions relevant to their persistence. Human cognition is then a highly integrated and extended form of this broader biological organisation.
A second approach interprets other organisms through human psychological categories, attributing features such as perception, memory, or decision-making in ways that may depend on specifically human forms of organisation. While this can be heuristically useful, it risks projecting categories beyond the conditions under which they are well-defined.
APS clarifies this distinction by grounding cognition in biological organisation rather than in human psychological categories. What varies across organisms is not whether cognition is present, but how viability-oriented activity is organised, integrated, and extended across time.
This distinction reflects a more general feature of explanatory grammar: concepts can be extended across domains either by abstracting their organisational basis or by projecting domain-specific categories. Only the former preserves explanatory coherence.