Cognitive Psychiatry and operational necessity: A cognitive reconstruction of the analytic, the synthetic and the necessary

Abstract

The analytic/synthetic distinction, central to Kant and later reworked, contested or abandoned in analytic philosophy, remains tied to unresolved questions about the nature of necessity, the origin of logical relations and the status of a priori knowledge. This article aims to argue that part of the difficulty arises because inquiry has focused on the products of cognition (concepts, propositions, meanings, formal systems) rather than on the cognitive instrument that generates them. From the standpoint of Cognitive Psychiatry, the analysis is shifted to the operational level. Logic, at its originary level, is conceived as the relatively invariant structure of the operations through which a cognitive system "praxizes" objects, events and relations. Concepts are treated as structures with "theoretical hooks", i.e., latent possibilities of connection that an operation can make explicit without new empirical input. The paper introduces operational necessity, the necessity arising from the functional invariants constitutive of a cognitive operation; defines it; offers four criteria for identifying it; distinguishes it from definitional necessity; and answers the charge of psychologism. It then situates the proposal against Kant, Carnap, Quine, Goodman, Davidson and recent work on mental action and logic, mathematical cognition, enactivism, the language of thought and predictive processing, and closes with limitations and a research agenda.