The relationship between linguistic forms and their meaning, utterance and its comprehension, has been from the onset at the centre of the history of linguistics and philosophy of language. Scientists have developed philosophical, practical, experimental, anthropological and psychological solutions to this problem. Recent developments in brain science aided by technology, statistical and digital modeling have resulted in enormous developments in brain and cognitive science, each purporting to discover the mechanism that attaches a set of verbal signals to a particular neural pathway. Such efforts fall into a long tradition of mapping discrete cognitive events to behavior in a fashion that conflates logical structures and biological ones. Here we present a concept of language cognition taken from ancient Indian linguistics that recognizes discrete utterances as indivisible events which submit to analysis only through abstraction. It is argued this ancient observation should be introduced into contemporary psycholinguistics and that the complications arising around the definition of a cognition could be resolved by resorting to more pragmatic methods.