Finite Cognition and the Structural Conditions of Scientific Knowledge: Stabilization, Formalization, and Epistemic Limits

Scientific knowledge depends on cognitive systems that are finite, physically embodied, and constrained in memory, attention, precision, and processing capacity. Rather than proposing a theory of reality itself, this paper develops a theory of the structural conditions that make scientific knowledge possible for finite cognition. It argues that scientific intelligibility depends on the stabilization, replication, and integration of information within bounded representational frameworks. Mathematics is treated as a formal extension of cognitive capacities rather than as evidence for a mind-independent mathematical ontology. Scientific progress is consequently understood as the exploration of the space of representations that finite systems can stabilize under changing empirical and technological constraints. On this view, epistemic limits need not appear as sharp frontiers. Instead, they may become inferable through potential heuristic indicators manifested in the historical dynamics of scientific inquiry, including diminishing discrimination between empirically successful models, increasing descriptive complexity accompanied by decreasing empirical returns, persistent empirical equivalence, and the displacement rather than resolution of unresolved questions.