The Paradox of Unlearned Inquiry

Which is the proper object of philosophical inquiry: the mature act of projecting meaning, or the initial acquisition of that capacity?

We are bound by a fundamental constraint: we cannot articulate anything that lies beyond the mechanisms through which we acquired the capacity for speech. Our expression is seemingly tethered to the history of our learning to speak.

And yet, a paradox emerges. We never learn to articulate, let alone denote, something like agentic projection of meaning (projecting meaning into the world).

A parallel may prove instructive here:

For Isaac Newton, the journey from the empirical observation of the apple to the abstraction of the Principia was not a leap into the unknown, but a traversal across a landscape he was already acquainted with and equipped to map.

Observing ourselves speak and framing it as the generation of meaning rather than linguistic performance, is, by contrast, far more than a leap into the unknown. It is an act we never acquired the capacity to perform; a claim to command a vantage point beyond language's edge.

We've never learned to say something like 'to generate meaning' as part of our ways of life.

Indeed, the phrase 'generating meaning' isn't mere gibberish. It possesses a clear semantic resonance that we intuitively grasp as coherent. But we do so on the level of the person, the speaker, not the Mind. Yet, it is the Mind whose function is to generate meaning, just as it is the person’s function to speak or think (thinking is not synonymous with the generation of meaning; it is performance – the enactment of logic, the application of curiosity – upon a plane that is conceptually sustained by the "fabric" of the Mind), whereby a logically and conceptually valid claim to grasp this notion withcoherence would have to encompass, or rather target, the level of the Mind. Such terminological conflation, while permissible in psychological contexts, is inadmissible from the standpoint of philosophical rigor, specifically where adirect reference to cognitive qualia is concerned.

But, again, we've never learned to refer that qualia as part of our ways of life.

This raises a startling question: How can I refer to, or denote (let alone examine), a reality for which I have no learned conceptual map?

One might even go a step further and argue that the art of philosophical wonder and inquiry is itself unlearned. Is it, then, the singular act we attempt to perform – to confront the bedrock of existence – without ever having been initiated into the "how"? Does philosophy represent the one thing we purport to do without ever having learned to do or even speak it? How can such a thing be done? Is this abstract cognitive activity more like breathing than doing math or physics or even art?

We proceed.