Conditions of Cognition: Why Meaning Cannot Explain Its Own Origin

Contemporary accounts of cognition and meaning typically investigate how meaning is processed, represented, or manipulated once it is available to experience. Far less attention has been given to the structural conditions that make intelligibility possible in the first place. This paper argues that prevailing approaches in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science operate within a structural circularity: their explanatory tools presuppose the very intelligibility they aim to explain. The paper diagnoses this circularity, explains why it remained historically invisible, and introduces a structural reorientation in which pre-semantic organization is treated as a condition rather than a content of cognition. On this view, cognition is not fundamentally a matter of symbol manipulation or representation, but a sequential stabilization of relations that renders experience intelligible prior to language and conceptual articulation. The aim is not to offer a complete theory of cognition, but to establish the necessity of a shift in analytic orientation without which further investigation remains structurally constrained.