Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Philosophy of language — meaning, content and reference as philosophy poses them — theories of meaning, meaning holism, assertion and whether machines assert, and conceptual change (group: philosophy).
22 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-001 | To what extent can an utterance’s pragmatic identity be reconstructed from a globally consistent collection of context-relative judgements, and what fails when it cannot? | A24’s refinement of QUESTION-021, once the underlying act was replaced by context-indexed judgements. It folds in A21’s question whether pragmatic dimensions show “an empirically identifiable incompatibility structure”. | Open |
| QUESTION-002 | What survives when an utterance is translated, retold or rendered in another medium? | The manuscript’s title question. An answer has to say what is held fixed across the transformation — wording, proposition, or something relational — and how preservation can be measured rather than asserted. | Open |
| QUESTION-003 | For a family of communicative decisions, what is the minimum information rate at which a translation preserves decision performance within a tolerance? | The second of the five central questions (A110 §IX), “a context- indexed pragmatic rate–distortion problem”, and A86’s target result (a). The manuscript §5 sets up the problem and does not state it. | Open |
| QUESTION-004 | Does pragmatic drift under repeated reconstruction systematically increase or reduce measured contextual dependence? | A52 §12.4, new in outline v4, joining the transmission line to the contextuality line. Not carried into the manuscript, whose Case II only asks that context effects be reported separately from possible contextuality. | Open |
| QUESTION-005 | How can corresponding communicative environments and responses be operationalized without building the preferred notion of fidelity into the measurement procedure? | A48’s closing, “The main unresolved issue”. Partly met by admissible correspondences (A49) and by the manuscript’s preregistered measurement cover (§10), neither of which says who fixes the correspondence of contexts. | Open |
| QUESTION-006 | Which pragmatic observables are conserved, exactly or within a bounded defect, by actual reconstruction kernels, and how does that depend on frame, genre and adaptation? | The third of the five central questions (A110 §IX), with the crystallized argument’s boxed question “Which observables are invariant under which communicative transformations?” The manuscript keeps the criterion (§4) and one sub-question, at what stage an invariant stops being conserved. | Open |
| QUESTION-008 | Is pragmatic fidelity a form of approximate bisimulation between communicative systems, and which parts of their update structure must it preserve? | Opened at A35 §10, made a formal layer of the outline at A38 §VI, and demoted deliberately at A39–A40 to an “optional refinement” whose usefulness “must be justified”. Absent from the manuscript. Set aside, not answered. | Deferred |
| QUESTION-010 v2 | Can a reconstruction chain preserve information sufficient for one family of pragmatic tasks while progressively destroying the relations needed to support another? | A100, Chapter 9: “The new question introduced by the sheaf-information synthesis.” Gestured at in the manuscript (§8, §11), not posed. Its one-step form for one categorical concept is QUESTION-249, Answered by THEORY-281. Chains, and relations, are open. | Open |
| QUESTION-012 | When does reconstruction through an intermediate image preserve or degrade observational structure relative to direct text-to-text reconstruction? | Proposal v6’s Result 5 (A100), “especially interesting as a proposition that connects the formal theory to a novel empirical setting”. Dropped from the manuscript, which keeps the text→image→caption chain as Case III but states no result about composition through a medium. | Open |
| QUESTION-014 | Does a stable speaker footing measurably reduce pragmatic drift relative to shifting frames, even when both drift lexically? | A67, after the inference harness could not be run: “The next result worth obtaining”. The manuscript’s Case II (stable complicit, stable admonitory, alternating and random frames) would answer it; no data exists. | Open |
| QUESTION-016 | Under what conditions does iterated reconstruction preserve, or progressively destroy, task-relative sufficiency? | A86 §10, the second of three “target results”. Neither it nor the other two was proved or stated in C6 or the manuscript, which has the data-processing inequality for a fixed Markov chain and a drift bound, not a sufficiency result. | Open |
| QUESTION-017 v2 | Where the additive bound fails, what bound on accumulated drift holds when distortion is directed and need not satisfy the triangle inequality? | A50 derived drift bounds assuming a metric, and in the same reply dropped symmetry and the triangle inequality for distortion. The tension was never resolved; the manuscript states its recursion “in the chosen metric”. | Open |
| QUESTION-020 | Can improving the interpreter substitute for information transmitted in the utterance, and at what rate–distortion trade-off? | A86 §6, “an experimental question we have not yet investigated”. The manuscript narrows it to a distinction, improving the signal versus improving the interpreter (§5), and an implication (§11); the trade- off itself was dropped without critique. | Open |
| QUESTION-021 | Is there a frame-independent communicative act that translations approximate, or is the act’s identity constituted by a family of frame-relative realizations? | Opened at A18 as “the deepest question in your line of thought”. The manuscript takes the second horn in practice (CLAIM-115) but never argues against the first. | Open |
| QUESTION-023 | Can the opacity of insider vocabulary be a preservation target in its own right? | Raised twice by the assistant in the Henley workshop (A6, A9) and never answered. The manuscript treats opacity only as a loss to an audience lacking knowledge (§5), not as something a rendering might owe its reader. | Open |
| QUESTION-024 | Can a pragmatic frame be induced from examples of communicative behaviour, and does the induced frame transfer across different wordings? | Opened at A44 §3C from Min et al.: a prompt can establish a convention without stating accurate propositions, which “resembles what we’ve been calling a delivery frame”. Kept as “convention induction” in outlines v3 and v4; absent from the manuscript. | Open |
| QUESTION-029 v2 | What constitutes the identity of a relationally organized communicative act, how can it be recognized apart from any one representation, and under which transformations does it persist? | The question the assistant put in place of “what does a translation preserve?” at A203 X (U56), and restated as the closing question of the October proposal (A218, U60). Filed so that the October thesis (CLAIM-139) has a question to answer while CLAIM-115 goes on answering QUESTION-002. Scoped to communicative acts; the exchange states it about “objects” and never argues the general version. | Open |
| QUESTION-050 | Does a communicative act’s identity split into a factor internal to the interpreter and a relational factor fixed by world and community, and which of the two must a translation preserve? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-151, CLAIM-115, CLAIM-118, CLAIM-046 and QUESTION-029. THEORY-089 answers it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-073 | Are teasing and reproach individuated by the speaker’s communicative intention, or partly by a frame the parties sustain together and by their standing? | Raised by CLAIM-221 and CLAIM-224 on 2026-10-10. Intention-based accounts of illocution (Grice; Strawson 1964; Bach and Harnish 1979) plausibly individuate teasing by the speaker’s intention. Goffman’s account of keying a play frame and Austin’s securing of uptake (LIT-785, unread) are the tradition’s replies. None of these is read here. An answer would read them and find a case in which the speaker’s intention is held fixed and the act verdicts of informed participants change with the parties’ standing or uptake. | Open |
| QUESTION-075 | Which tasks and which receivers fix the human criterion against which a measure of communicative fidelity is validated? | Raised by CLAIM-244 and CLAIM-226 on 2026-10-10. Every central defeat condition used a task-free judgement by unnamed judges. An answer names a task family and a receiver population for each claim, and says how fidelity for one population bears on another (CLAIM-074). | Open |
| QUESTION-249 | If a map of a representation X of finite support keeps no information about a categorical concept A, how much information about X can it keep, and when does it keep that much? | The one-step, information-theoretic part of QUESTION-010, split off under ADR-049 and answered by THEORY-281. The map can keep at most H(X|A), and it keeps that much exactly when X is a function of the output and A. A deterministic map gets there only when the concept groups’ distributions are permutations of one another. Chains, and relations as against a categorical label, stay with QUESTION-010. | Answered |
| QUESTION-293 | Is the distortion of a composite of approximate transports bounded by the sum of its parts’ distortions, and does that additive bound survive when the distortion lacks a triangle inequality or a later kernel stretches distances? | The additive part of QUESTION-017, split off by the status review of 2026-10-27 under ADR-049, because CLAIM-260 (Active) settles it in full. The composite of an ε₁-transport and an ε₂-transport is an (Lε₁ + ε₂)-transport when the distortion obeys a triangle inequality, with L the later kernel’s stretch, so additive when that kernel is nonexpansive, as every Markov kernel is in total variation. Without a triangle inequality, or with an expansive kernel, the additive bound fails. | Answered |