Cognitive Psychiatry and the natural genesis of concepts: Processuality, co-praxis, co-cognition and conceptual accretivity as foundations of a naturalistic epistemogenesis

Modern epistemology usually examines concepts once they are already constituted, leaving unexplained how they arise and how they change while remaining recognizably the same. Objective: to propose, from Cognitive Psychiatry, a naturalistic epistemogenesis of concepts grounded in processuality. Methodology: a theoretical, hypothesis-generating essay confronting the proposal with antecedents in Hilbert, Frege, Mill, Pap, Lewis, Dewey, Hegel and Wittgenstein and with recent literature on embodied cognition, active inference, the neuroscience of concepts and dimensional psychiatric nosology. Results and Discussion: knowledge begins with the organism's causal, temporal and functional co-participation with the world (co-praxis); concepts are stable coagulations of these processes, later reworked by cognition operating on its own products (co-cognition). Reification is a necessary instrument of thought, threatened by hyper-reification and de-reification. Conceptual accretivity is proposed as a third way between rigid identity and total replacement: a co-praxic core is preserved while new strata, relations and theoretical hooks accrue, in a surpassing that negates and preserves. Redefinitions change descriptions and interpretations, not the events they refer to. The model is applied to schizophrenia as a syndrome, to the distinction between error and lying, to theoretical hooks that define a function before an entity and to a conceptual pathophysiology of rigidity, fragmentation, hyperassociativity, impoverishment and loss of anchorage. Final Considerations: analyticity can be understood processually, as the structuring persistence of apprehended relations in a globally connected world that admits local syntheses, making the natural history of concepts a legitimate domain of Cognitive Psychiatry.