Foundations of Intelligibility: The Architecture of Cognitive Availability and the Distribution of Order

Perceptual organization is commonly treated as the point at which heterogeneous input becomes structured and intelligible. This paper argues that such accounts introduce an unresolved structural dependency: intelligibility cannot be generated by the very process it is meant to enable. Before cognition can operate, heterogeneous conditions must first stabilize into a unified configuration through a prior process of consolidation. The product of this process is what the paper terms a pre-semantic structure, a non-linguistic, non-conceptual configuration that is already intelligible as a situation and upon which cognitive operations depend. Consolidation, the process through which heterogeneous conditions are compressed into this unified configuration, is constrained by a historically formed pattern of relevance that determines selection and priority without constituting conceptual content. The framework is architectural rather than mechanistic: it identifies a structural level that predictive, representational, enactive, and access-based theories presuppose without isolating. Distinguishing this level from the operations that depend on it resolves structural circularities in existing accounts and clarifies the sequence through which cognition becomes possible.