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OTHER SOURCES OF EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE
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trace to the level of consciousness. When perception and recollection are combined in a particular form to produce synthetic experience expressed in a synthetic judgment, we get recognition. When we get a description like, 'know him to be Caitra who is shaggy all over the body, who has protruding teeth, who is dwarfish and who has broad eyes and a snub nose', we make out Caitra when we see him next. Similarly, a man from the North happens to describe a camel as 'a cursed animal with long crooked neck and with ugly limbs, addicted to feeding on hard sharp bramble'. A man from the south who heard this description happens to see a thing of such description, he then recognizes the animal as a camel in the form of a synthetic judgment, 'the object in front is a camel'. 31 The Jainas have emphasized the synthetic nature of recognition as an act of cognition. However, it is a concrete psychosis in which the present and the past, perception and recollection are synthesized. In this sense, recognition is different from recollection, although recognition involves recollection as a factor. In recognition, the object is present before us; in recollection, what is recollected is not present to our senses.
A psychological analysis of recognition shows that recognition is a fusion of a percept with an image. Recognition accepts or rejects the object recalled in memory. We recognize when we react to present experience as familiar. The sight of a face, the sound of a note, the smell of a rose, all these may be experienced as being familiar. But we recall a word by speaking it, or we recall past activities after an interval. Hunter makes a distinction between recall and recollection. Recollection involves personal aspects in the memory. Recognition has been described as a mental state which may be definite or indefinite. We may get indefinite recognition in which we only get a feeling of familiarity without getting a definite picture of that experience. Recognition will be definite when it refers to the place and time of the experience. In such recognition we get, as Titchner said, a revival of the cognition of an object once experienced, associated with a group of other ideas and tinged with a feeling of familiarity. Thus, in recognition, the perception of an object and the recall of the percept are synthesized to produce a concrete psychosis of recognition. The Jainas described such a concrete psychosis as recognition, or pratyabhijñā. However, Stout says that recognition in its more primitive form does not require discrimination of the universal from the particular, but only a confused or implicit awareness in which the universal is not separately apprehended as a distinct object of thought. In recognition, there is only a rudimentary judgment of recognition inasmuch as the universal nature of the particular is confusedly apprehended. Yet, there is no judgment in which the subject and the predicate are
31 Pramänamimämsä, I. 1, 2, 4 and Commentary.
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