From process to form: Foundations for a cognitive-praxic refoundation of epistemology. Concept, language, communication and understanding before representation

Abstract

This theoretical article examines the Kantian theory of the concept, as reconstructed by Robert Hanna, and proposes from the standpoint of Cognitive Psychiatry an inversion of its explanatory order. The objective is to show that concept, object, unity, representation, sign, rule and understanding are late results of cognition and cannot serve as its original conditions. The method is a qualitative conceptual essay supported by a narrative review of classical sources and of studies published between 2021 and 2026. Hanna’s formulation is decomposed into six theses, each confronted with a genetic reconstruction that begins in the lived and praxic processuality in which organism and world are already causally coupled. The results describe a sequence that runs from praxis through interindividual coupling and synchronisation to objectification and formalisation, and only then reaches signification, concept, representation and propositional language. To be told to another person, lived experience has to be chewed into communicable units, which requires a model of the listener’s mind and a model of one’s own; both derive from the mother, the first verbal accompanist of the infant’s praxes, whose accompaniment, once internalised, helps to constitute the secondary self. The vocalisation “ai” in pain illustrates functional communication prior to semiosis: the sign arises when a stabilised praxis becomes decoupled from its original situation and able to evoke it. Recent developmental studies converge with this ordering. It is concluded that form does not found process; process progressively founds form, which calls for a genetic epistemology of pre-objectal, pre-formal and pre-semiotic processualities.