An Introduction to ‘Inner Cognition’ Strategy as A Research Approach for the Semantic Aspects of Architecture

Prior to the prominence of modern sciences, people adopted various approaches to understand things. After that, though, these approaches were limited to fewer types. In recent decades the efficiency of modern understanding methods has been subject to revisions, with some thinkers trying to recourse to the past in order to address present-day limits. This has resulted in some of earlier approaches having retrieved their former credibility. Despite qualitative researches, there are shortcomings in cognitive strategies in researches on the semantic aspects of architecture. Alternative strategies, therefore, need to be sought for cognition based on the past experience. The present research is an attempt to explain a strategy called ‘inner cognition’ to approach human unmediated inner cognition, based on the historic wisdom about intuitive knowledge on one hand, and contemporary debates regarding intuition on the other. In order to do so, the present paper goes through an introduction to the strategy, followed by discussions on techniques, achievements, examples, and applications of the proposed strategy in semantic research. In this strategy cognitive tools such as wisdom, heart and revelation are explained through techniques such as observance, allegory, approbation and gloss. It is expected that this strategy offers normative theories to architectural semantics. The present text proposes ‘inner cognition’ not as a general but a specific strategy, solely to give more depth to architectural semantic research.