Biologists often use the same cognitive terms across a wide range of living systems. Organisms as different as bacteria, plants, animals, and humans may all be described as exhibiting memory, learning, communication, anticipation, or decision-making.
APS recognises that such shared terminology can identify potentially informative comparisons, but it does not imply that these systems possess identical psychological capacities. Similar terms may refer to processes that differ substantially in their mechanisms, complexity, organisation, and experiential character.
What can justify the use of a common term is not the presence of a common mind but an independently warranted similarity in the organisational role relevant to the explanandum. For example, processes described as memory may involve retained effects of previous conditions that influence later activity, without thereby implying conscious recollection, subjective awareness, equivalent cognitive architecture, or even that every such process warrants cognitive attribution.
APS therefore treats terminological continuity as a reason to investigate possible functional or organisational continuity, not as evidence that such continuity has already been established. Shared vocabulary can support comparison only where the relevant similarities and differences are independently specified and warranted.
Shared terms should not be mistaken for shared minds.