Prologue: The Starting Point of Cognition | StructLang

You are reading this book.

At this moment, your attention is focused on this line of text. You see black letters, white background, a certain font. You might be sitting, or lying down. There might be sounds around you, or it might be quiet.

Now, please stop and look around.

What do you see?

Perhaps a table, a window, a glass of water. But you are not seeing everything in the room simultaneously. Your gaze has a focal point, your attention has a center. What you “see” at this moment is only a small portion of the room. Those things at the edge of your vision, behind you, things you haven’t noticed at all—at this moment, for you, they don’t exist.

When you want to find your phone, the phone “jumps” out from the background; when you’re hungry, the smell of food suddenly becomes clear; when you’re in a hurry, traffic lights seem particularly long.

The same world presents itself in completely different ways because your intentions differ. This is empirical fact.

Three Meanings of Subjective

When we say “starting from the subjective,” what do we mean?

We must clarify the three meanings of “subjective”—they are often confused.

First: Perspectivity

Any experience necessarily proceeds from some perspective.

You stand at this position in the room and see the window; I stand at another position and see the door. Even if you take a photo with a camera, the photo has a shooting angle, focal length, exposure time. Even if scientists measure with precision instruments, the instrument readings need people to observe, record, and interpret.

There is no “perspective-less viewing.”

Perspectives can be switched, pluralized, dialogued. I can walk to your position and see the door you see; you can walk to my position and see the window I see. Multiple perspectives can verify, complement, and correct each other.

Key insight: Perspective is not an obstacle to things themselves but the condition that makes experience possible.

Second: Constitutivity

Experience is not a passively received impression but an actively constructed product.

You see a blade of grass. But what you see is not “the totality of the grass”—you see a shape from a certain angle, a color under certain light, a size at a certain distance, and certain features you notice.

More importantly: you organize these sensory inputs into “a blade of grass.”

An infant seeing the same thing won’t organize it as “grass”—because they don’t yet have the concept of “grass.” A botanist seeing it will organize it as “a gramineous plant”; someone looking for medicinal herbs will organize it as “usable/unusable.”

Perception involves:

• Selection: What enters attention (grass, not the soil beside it)
• Organization: How to categorize (this is a blade of grass, not a bunch of green pixels)
• Interpretation: What it means (grass to lie on vs. weeds to remove)

You can never access “pre-conceptual” raw material. The “given” itself is already the result of being “constructed.”

Key insight: Constitutivity doesn’t mean “the world is fictional,” but that sensations are always organized within conceptual frameworks.

Third: Idiosyncrasy

Each subject has its particular historical trajectory, and thus its unique cognitive structure.

• Biological differences: Your visual sensitivity differs from mine
• Cultural background: You grew up in the city, I grew up in the countryside
• Personal experience: You fell on grass as a child, I played on grass

No two people’s experiences are exactly the same.

But this doesn’t equal “complete isolation”—subjectivity is formed on a shared biological foundation and social interaction.
Communication is possible because we share language, tasks, and reproducible experiments.

Key insight: Idiosyncrasy doesn’t mean “unable to communicate,” but reminds us to take perspectival differences seriously.

Why Start from the Subjective

Since subjectivity is a structural constraint of cognition, we must start here.

We are not choosing subjectivity, but acknowledging subjectivity.

All Cognition Must Proceed Through Subjectivity

You read a science textbook with your eyes and understand with your brain. You conduct a physics experiment, observe instruments with your senses, and record data with your judgment. There is no direct channel that “transcends subjectivity.”

We always work within subjectivity—this is not a position, but a fact.

Acknowledging Subjectivity Enables Understanding Objectivity

Science is considered the “most objective” knowledge. But scientific experiments are designed, operated, observed, recorded, and interpreted by people.

The “objectivity” of science comes from: multiple subjective observations can verify, repeat, and correct each other.

So-called “objectivity” is the stable overlap of multiple subjectivities that can be repeated, cross-checked, and tested over time.

Acknowledging subjective constraints actually allows you to:

• Remain alert to the limitations of your own perspective
• Take other perspectives seriously
• Understand how consensus forms

This is a Tool, Not a Creed

Starting from the subjective is not to proclaim some truth, but to establish a set of operational analytical tools.

Just as cartography starts from “the cartographer’s perspective” to accurately mark terrain;

We start from the subjective to accurately mark how cognition operates, enabling you to better understand, judge, and decide.

Look around again and notice what intention made a certain object jump into your foreground.

Now, we can begin.

In the chapters that follow, you will see:
How cognition develops from the simplest attention focus into complex relational judgments—
from observation at a single moment to dynamic changing processes.

In the next chapter, we will formally name this “foreground” selected by intention as point structure.