The Anatomy of Belief

The Anatomy of Belief investigates belief not as propositional assent but as a structural condition of cognition. The essay argues that standard accounts of belief generate an infinite regress when justification is treated as exclusively propositional. Rather than resolving regress through foundational propositions, the inquiry proposes that regress halts at structural limits within the organism that make inquiry and justification possible in the first place. Drawing on examples from linguistics, perception, music, and documented neurological conditions, the essay develops the concept of structural singularities: constitutional boundaries at which further destabilization would dissolve the conditions of cognition itself. These singularities are not explicit beliefs or axioms but operative constraints that allow something to stand as real. The analysis extends to moral and metaphysical domains, suggesting that while the content of such structural limits varies across organisms and cultures, the requirement that something stabilize experience does not. When explanatory regress reaches its outer boundary, cognition tends to converge upon generative or agent-like termini capable of grounding order. The essay contributes to debates in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics by reframing belief as a constitutional activity through which experience becomes inhabitable, rather than as a secondary act of assent to propositions.