In his early work, Heidegger is a resolute critic of cognitivist models of human understanding. Cognitive states like knowing, thinking, believing, representing, and many forms of perception, he argues, are “not a primary but a founded way of being-in-the-world -- a way that is always possible only on the basis of a non-cognizing comportment” (GA20: 222). Heidegger maintains, moreover, that a failure to recognize the dependent character of cognition is responsible for skewing most accounts of ontology. In fact, Heidegger signals at various places his commitment to three claims or theses:
The Priority Thesis: the innerworldly entities that we encounter most of the time are uncovered in the first instance through non-cognitive forms of comportment.
The Ontological-Distortion Thesis: the way that cognition uncovers entities tends to give rise to a distorted understanding of the being of entities as they are discovered by “primary” or non-cognitive comportments.
The Dependency Thesis: cognitive comportments (thought, assertion, judgment, belief, etc.) are founded on our ability to engage in non-cognitive forms of comportment.
There is considerable scholarly disagreement on how best to make sense of these theses. In this paper, I want to advance, develop, and refine an interpretation of Heidegger's understanding of the relationship between cognition and being.
