Image Abstraction and Analogical Correlation as a Meta-Epistemological Structure: A Proof of Universal Necessity

Current explanations of human uniqueness are often framed in terms of derivative capacities such as language, symbols, culture, or tool use. Yet these capacities themselves may presuppose a more fundamental cognitive architecture. This paper pushes the inquiry to the foundational level of “how cumulative human cognition becomes possible” and proposes a meta-cognitive genetic-structural framework. This paper adopts a transcendental argumentation approach. Within this framework, a reductio ad absurdum is employed to show that any cognitive system capable of producing stable knowledge accumulation requires four non-eliminable stages: image abstraction, analogical correlation, verification, and feedback. These four stages constitute the necessary structural constraints for cognitive accumulation. Consequently, causality, subjectivity, and objecthood are reinterpreted as emergent outcomes of the long-term iterative operation of this cognitive loop rather than as epistemic primitives of philosophy and science. This paper further argues that quxiang bilei (image abstraction and analogical correlation) in classical Chinese philosophy is not a local mode of thinking but a historically preserved formalization – from early civilizational history – of the systematic reflection on this meta-cognitive structure. The universality claimed here is structural necessity based on reductio ad absurdum reasoning, not statistical universality. This paper argues that causality, subjectivity, and objecthood are not prerequisites of cognition but results of cumulative cognition. The question is thus reversed: what philosophy has long treated as premises may in fact be outcomes. The four-stage structure of quxiang bilei that enables this reversal is not intended as a model invented by humans but as an operative fact identified from real cognitive activities.