Conditions of Cognition: Why Meaning Cannot Explain Its Own Origin

This paper examines the structural conditions that make meaning and intelligibility possible, arguing that contemporary philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science operate within a form of explanatory circularity. Prevailing approaches analyze meaning, representation, and cognition only after they have already emerged, thereby presupposing the very intelligibility they aim to explain. The paper identifies this circularity, explains why it remained historically invisible, and proposes a structural reorientation in which pre-semantic organization is treated as a condition of cognition rather than a representational layer. On this view, cognition is not fundamentally the manipulation of symbols or content, but the sequential stabilization of relations that precede semantic articulation. Meaning is treated as an outcome of this organization, not its origin. A central consequence of this shift is the recognition that enabling conditions cannot be fully observed from within their own effects. This structural limitation clarifies why introspection, formal modeling, and empirical analysis encounter persistent limits when attempting to explain cognition’s foundations. The paper does not propose a computational architecture, empirical model, or metaphysical doctrine. Its contribution is diagnostic and structural: it establishes the necessity of pre-semantic structural awareness as a prerequisite for further theoretical, empirical, or applied work. It complements a prior structural analysis of pre-semantic organization by the same author, which formalizes the relational mechanisms presupposed here. Files