prehension

Prehension is the act of grasping or taking hold of something. The word derives from the Latin prehendere, meaning “to seize” or “to grasp,” and in everyday use it can refer to physical grasping as well as the mental grasp or understanding of ideas, situations, or experiences.

In psychology and cognitive science, prehension denotes the process by which an organism or mind apprehends and incorporates aspects of its environment into its experience. It covers perceptual intake, the assimilation of sensory data, and the integration of new information with prior knowledge. In common language, to prehend a concept is to grasp or understand it.

In the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (process philosophy), prehension is a technical term for the basic act by which an actual entity (an occasion of experience) takes into account data from other actual entities. A prehension is a felt relation to the past world that contributes to the entity’s ongoing becoming. Whitehead distinguishes positive prehensions (accepting or incorporating data) from negative prehensions (excluding data), and distinguishes external and internal prehensions depending on the source of the data. The network of prehensions, through concrescence, yields a new actual entity.

In phenomenology and related traditions, the term is used to describe the embodied, pre-reflective grasp of the world by the body and senses. In biology, prehension refers more generally to the act of grasping by an organism’s limbs or mouthparts, especially when describing prehensile appendages. Overall, prehension encompasses both the concrete act of grasping and the more abstract processes by which beings apprehend and integrate their experiences.