Before the Proposition: Dependent Origination, Contingency, and the Pre-Symbolic Genesis of Knowing

Abstract

This paper examines the formation of knowing before it becomes stabilized as an explicit proposition, definition, or other symbolic epistemic output. Philosophical and scientific accounts of knowledge frequently privilege articulated results, while the conditions through which those results become epistemically possible receive less attention. The present inquiry focuses on the generative interval in which an encounter, discrepancy, affective disturbance, or contingent relation begins to reorganize a subject's epistemic orientation before a determinate conceptual formulation is available. The paper develops a relational account of this process through the concepts of dependent origination, contingency, pre-articulated apprehension, and symbolic formation. Knowing is approached as an event whose emergence can depend upon historically accumulated dispositions, material and social conditions, prior symbolic organization, concrete encounters, and contingencies that cannot be reconstructed from the final proposition alone. The distinction among what is not yet symbolized, what is only partially symbolizable under existing conditions, and what may resist complete symbolic preservation is maintained throughout the analysis. Symbolization is consequently treated as an epistemically productive transformation rather than as the transparent transcription of an already completed internal content. A Generative Relational perspective is used to examine the trajectory from latent epistemic organization through encounter and pre-articulated differentiation toward question formation and propositional expression. Comparative resources from Buddhist accounts of dependent origination and seed–manifestation relations, phenomenology, pragmatism, tacit knowing, and process-oriented approaches are employed without assuming doctrinal equivalence among them. The paper argues that a proposition can preserve an epistemic result while failing to preserve the trajectory through which that result became meaningful. The history of knowing can therefore possess epistemic significance that is not reducible to the semantic content of its final symbolic expression. This distinction provides a conceptual basis for subsequent work on epistemic provenance, artificial intelligence, and forms of knowledge production in which highly developed symbolic outputs can increasingly be generated without equivalent participation in the processes through which human knowing emerges.