What does «apercepción» mean in Spanish?
- Any of the various aspects of perception and consciousness in fields such as psychology, philosophy and epistemology. In general we can say that an apperception is an attentive perception accompanied by reflection and awareness.
- In philosophy, internal act of recognition of the perceived object. The term originates with René Descartes in the form of the word apercevoir in his book Traité des passions. Leibniz introduced the concept of apperception into the more technical philosophical tradition, in his Principes de la nature fondés en raison et de la grâce; although he used the word practically in the sense of modern attention, by which an object is apprehended as "not being" and yet in relation to being. Immanuel Kant distinguished between transcendental apperception and empirical apperception. The first is the perception of an object involving the consciousness of pure being as subject - "the pure, original, immutable consciousness which is the necessary condition of experience and the ultimate ground of the unity of experience." The second is "the consciousness of the actual concrete self with its changing states," the so-called "inner sense." (Otto F. Kraushaar in Runes). Transcendental apperception is almost equivalent to self-consciousness; the existence of the ego may be more or less prominent, but it is always involved.
- In psychology, apperception is "the process by which new experience is assimilated and transformed by the residue of an individual's past experience to form a new whole". In short, it is perceiving new experience in relation to past experience. Perception changes upon reaching consciousness due to the contextual presence of the other things that are already there, therefore it is not perceived but appreciated. Apperception refers to the totality of conscious activities involved in the selection and interpretation of a given sensory element. Primarily a product of a mental process, apperception is formed and developed by education and experience during the life of the individual.
- In Epistemology, apperception is "the introspective or reflective apprehension by the mind of its own internal states".