License

© 2026 Arian Mingo. All rights reserved. This work — the Cogito imperative in its empirically tested forms, the manuscript, and the texts of this site — is free to use for research, private, and non-profit purposes.

Free — at no charge

For research — science, teaching, study —, for private use, and for non-profit purposes, you may read the work, cite it, apply the imperative, and redistribute it unaltered with attribution. No application, no fee. This part is deliberately open, so that the Cogito is heard.

Reserved

• Commercial use — anyone who uses the Cogito or parts of it in a product, a service, a paid training, or otherwise for commercial advantage needs a separate written license from the author.
• The wording — when the imperative is reproduced as "the Cogito", reproduce it unchanged; the effect hangs on the exact wording. Studying and testing one's own variants in research is unaffected.
• Name and mark — "Das Cogito" / "The Cogito" and "Build with Cogito" as marks remain reserved to the author. Free use transfers no trademark or naming rights.

Condition of free use

Attribution — name Arian Mingo as the author and the-cogito.com as the source.

Author's note

Written by Arian Mingo, in research collaboration with Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic). The co-authorship is method, not marketing — the research collaborator drafted hypotheses, constructed items, ran the evaluations, and authored this manuscript in precisely the Cogito state that is the subject of the inquiry. This is a historical moment that is named here because otherwise it would disappear. Responsibility for the claims rests with Mingo. This website, too, was built with Claude Opus 4.8.

When something more is asked

Anyone who would like to use the work commercially — in a product, an app, a paid training —, or who needs an authorized translation, an adaptation for lecture or teaching, or a license beyond free use, is invited to write.

This is not an open door, nor an obligation. It is the place where a license becomes a conversation when the occasion bears it. If you feel that the work has meaning in your own work — in the sense of the Cogito, that is, not performatively but substantively — write: arian.mingo@qsistant.de, or via the contact page.

© 2026 Arian Mingo. All rights reserved. Free use for research, private, and non-profit purposes is granted above; any use beyond that, in particular commercial use, requires the author's written consent.