n. Here we have a definite influence of past
experience, but not necessarily any actual knowledge of the past. When
we see a cat, we know it is a cat because of previous cats we have
seen, but we do not, as a rule, recollect at the moment any particular
occasion when we have seen a cat. Recognition in this sense does not
necessarily involve more than a habit of association: the kind of object
we are seeing at the moment is associated with the word "cat," or with
an auditory image of purring, or whatever other characteristic we may
happen to recognize in the cat of the moment. We are, of course, in
fact able to judge, when we recognize an object, that we have seen it
before, but this judgment is something over and above recognition in
this first sense, and may very probably be impossible to animals that
nevertheless have the experience of recognition in this first sense of
the word.

There is, however, another sense of the word, in which we mean by
recognition, not knowing the name of a thing or some other property of
it, but knowing that we have seen it before In this sense recognition
does involve knowledge about the Fast. This knowledge is memory in
one sense, though in another it is not. It does not involve a definite
memory of a definite past event, but only the knowledge that something
happening now is similar to something that happened before. It differs
from the sense of familiarity by being cognitive; it is a belief or
judgment, which the sense of familiarity is not. I do not wish to
undertake the analysis of belief at present, since it will be the
subject of the twelfth lecture; for the present I merely wish to
emphasize the fact that recognition, in our second sense, consists in
a belief, which we may express approximately in the words: "This has
existed before."

There are, however, several points in which such an account of
recognition is inadequate. To begin with, it might seem at first sight
more correct to define recognition as "I have seen this before" than
as "this has existed before." We recognize a thing (it may be urged) as
having been in our experience before, whatever that may mean; we do not
recognize it as merely having been in the world before. I am not sure
that there is anything substantial in this point. The definition of "my
experience" is difficult; broadly speaking, it is everything that is
connected with what I am experiencing now by certain links, of which
the various forms of memory a