Strawson [1] gives a contrast-based illustration of the understanding (CP) experience. Jacques, a monoglot French speaker, and Jack, a monoglot English speaker, are listening to the news in French. Jacques’ and Jack’s experiences are not the same even though they are exposed to the same stimulus. Their reported understanding experiences are different. Jacques understands what is being said, whereas Jack does not. This suggests that the CP component of their overall phenomenological state is distinct and different. Proponents of the “cognitive-experience-view” state that this difference is the understanding cognitive experience—an element of CP and not SP. Proponents of the “no-cognitive-experience-view” believe that there is, indeed, a difference in experience; however, it could be claimed that it is of a sensory phenomenological type, due to differing sensory matching properties with previous auditory memories. Experiences between individuals cannot be compared, but the responses of understanding and not, supports the presence of CP.

To contrast the above CP against sensory phenomenology (SP), consider looking at a picture, say the Mona Lisa, or listening to a piece of music, say the Beatles’ “Yesterday”. Sensory phenomenology indicates that the central subject of our experience (the “what it’s like”) is respectively the painting itself or the music itself. Such experiences include sensory and/or affective sensations evoked by the painting or the music. There may, also, be associations with why one is there looking at the painting or a memory of a previous occasion that the music was heard. It is evident that for CP the something it is like to understand, assign meaning, or be thinking are unique experiences, qualitatively different from experiencing the modality-specific phenomenology of SP.

Montague [4] approaches CP with the purpose of having strong definitions of both CP and SP and their roles. She defines low- and high-level properties where low-level properties are used to denote properties like color, pitch, and smell. High-level properties are properties such as the ones found in natural kinds (lions and palm trees) or functional kinds (tables, beds). Accordingly, she posits a “rough” dichotomy of sensory phenomenology and cognitive phenomenology as follows:

“Sensory phenomenology is the phenomenology associated with the representation of low-level properties. Cognitive Phenomenology (CP) is the phenomenology associated with the representation of high-level properties (including the conceptual activity this representation requires or the activity associated with the deployment of concepts and abstractions)”.

She identifies three possible beliefs about the phenomenal state: (i) the “cognitive phenomenology” view which includes both sensory and cognitive experience, but differentiates between them; (ii) the “thick sensory” view which argues that the high level and low level are of the same sensory kind; and (iii) the “thin sensory” view which argues that some seeming high level is of the same kind as the low. With these beliefs, she assesses three kinds of test phenomena: first, “seeing x as x”; second, perceiving words in a language one understands; and third, visual/auditory imagery as occurs in inner speech. She concludes that only (i), involving both CP and SP, favors all three tests.

As an aside, we glance at a neurological issue. In the visual modality for instance, sensory phenomenology is known to be supported by the collaborative action of various areas of the visual cortex. In more detail, the signal is relayed from the retina through the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) to the primary visual cortex and to the other visual areas. It is also known that the retina contains many cells, specifically layers of photoreceptors that are specialized for different colors. So color, a low level property, is already “present” in the retina, even ahead of subcortical areas. However, if we take a “word”, the experience of seeing the letters’ shape in vision is partly low level. The high-level (or CP) experience is more difficult to position neurally. Thus, experiencing the meaning of words is a high-level or CP experience for which neurological evidence is not easily available. Hence, the example in Cognitive Phenomenology: Neurolinguistic Issues is of some import.

In further support of CP, an “irreducibility” argument is set out by Chundoff [5]. He highlights the salient irreducible nature of cognitive phenomenology, irreducibility being defined as “Some cognitive states put one in phenomenal states for which no wholly sensory states suffice”. Our arguments, herein, confirm the insufficient explanatory power of sensory phenomenology (SP) in the case of “Pure Phenomenal Contrast Arguments” such as Jacques and Jack’s experiences adding evidence for the reality of cognitive phenomenology.

Before returning to arguments in favor of the existence of CP, a strong, and oft-quoted argument that questions cognitive phenomenology needs to be considered. It is about concepts. We note that concepts, understanding, and thought fall under cognitive phenomenology in the opinion of CP proponents. Carruthers and Veillet [6, 7], however, argue that cognitive content (the content that is part of our concepts and thoughts, not the one particular to our senses and emotions), doesn’t contribute to our “felt or subjective experience”. That is, they are not part of the overall phenomenal experience. They cite Tye [8, 9] and argue that our mental lives are only “invaded” by our perceptual (senses and emotive experiences and that those constitute our full phenomenal consciousness. They hypothesize that a “confusion” arises from the fact that we do not make the difference between the causal contributions and the constitutive contributions that concepts do to our phenomenological experience. They take bird-watching as an example. The argument is that when we learn the categories or bird types, the new experience that one feels is not CP. They claim that the change comes from the visual experience that is different when one attends to different features peculiar to each bird type. This, they contend, is not due to any “new/different” phenomenology that pervades our mental life but follows from the fact that attention, allocated to different parts of the visual scene, “causes” us to experience a change or a different visual experience. The point is about a change in overt attention,they also give another example about covert attention in the auditory modality just like the visual modality above. We could divert our attention overtly or covertly and hence undergo different verbal/auditory experiences. While this debate continues, we assume the Strawson view that CP is mutually exclusive, but jointly exhaustive with sensory phenomenology (SP) and add arguments to this view.

Next, two new arguments are given that corroborate the point of view that the understanding experience that exists in reading, hearing, or thinking is of a non-sensory and non-emotive type. Reflecting on the sensory experiences of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, we can fairly tell that they “feel” different when experienced through our sensory “input ports” compared to when we imagine them. It is noted that the difference lies in how easy it is to “imagine” in each of the cited modalities. For example, “looking at something red” feels different from when we “imagine redness”. In other words, looking at red is more “vivid” than imagining red. If we get exposed to a sound, it feels different from when we imagine this sound; it is, also, a question of vividness. However, if we understand a sentence, written or heard, the understanding experience “feels” the same if we imagine it. It is easy to check by a self-experiment that the experience is the same both ways (written/heard or imagined). Consequently, since understanding feels the same when it first occurs or through imagination, it is of a different nature from sensory phenomenology.

Next, we note that the time affects SP and CP differently. If something is not understood, a solution to a problem in physics let us say, unless the understander gathers more knowledge, the problem can remain not understood with time. Of course, this assumes that the state of knowledge of the understander remains constant and no new learning has taken place. On the other hand, a problem resolved or understood, largely stays understood, given no deficit in the understander’s mechanisms. Often quoted in the literature is that someone with conventional knowledge of algebra, faced with something like (2A = A implies A = 0), after a little effort, may enter a CP state of understanding which is unlikely to change with time. But something like A@9 = P* causes entry into a CP state of not understanding and will never be understood as the rules with which it is written are not known. SP experiences have a greater tendency to change with time. Experience of a traumatic event, a friend’s death, for instance, works differently. Even if we imagine some unhappy past event, it will feel relatively different and not as dramatic as it has been felt once, when it actually happened. Hence, flow of time impacts, differently, the understanding experience and feeling experiences; this is another reason to say that the understanding experience is not of an emotive/sensory type.