One entry per document, generated from frontmatter — edit the fragments in
this directory, then run luria index.
Quantum foundations (2) — what quantum theory says about the world — contextuality, epistemic restrictions, interference, reconstructions and toy theories, quantum thermodynamics: 024 · 087
Contextuality (4) — whether outcomes can be explained without reference to the context of measurement — Kochen–Specker and Bell contextuality and their sheaf-theoretic form, generalized (Spekkens) contextuality, noncontextual models and their limits, and contextuality outside physics: 002 · 026 · 031 · 042
Mathematics (14) — mathematics read for itself — category theory, topoi and sheaves, spectral geometry, set and measure theory — including mathematical frameworks applied to other fields: 004 · 007 · 008 · 015 · 036 · 041 · 046 · 069 · 077 · 078 · 090 · 091 · 093 · 097
Game theory (2) — strategic interaction and its equilibria — evolutionary stability, repeated games, bargaining, coordination, signalling and conventions — in biology, economics and philosophy (ADR-019): 077 · 078
Network science (0) — the structure and dynamics of networks — dimension, curvature and Ricci flow, community detection, consensus and synchronization.
Complex systems (15) — emergence, information decomposition, individuality, self-organization — how collective behaviour arises from parts: 003 · 020 · 046 · 049 · 051 · 054 · 062 · 065 · 068 · 070 · 071 · 086 · 088 · 090 · 093
Probabilistic modeling (4) — Bayesian inference and statistical models outside deep learning — nonparametric priors, topic models, samplers: 021 · 024 · 033 · 054
Neuroscience (0) — brains and nervous systems — representation, coding and dynamics measured in biological tissue.
Natural sciences (0) — physics, astronomy, planetary and earth science, chemistry, biology and medicine read outside any machine-learning claim.
Ecology (0) — how organisms interact with each other and their environment — symbiosis and host–microbe partnerships, competition, herbivory and trophic interactions, community structure, resilience and regime shifts in ecosystems (ADR-028). How a partner comes to live inside another and depend on it is endosymbiosis (ADR-055).
Endosymbiosis and reductive evolution (0) — how one organism comes to live inside another and depend on it, and how that ends — reductive genome evolution by drift, deletional bias or adaptive loss (including the Black Queen dependencies of free-living microbes), complementary loss across partners, nested symbioses and symbiont splitting and replacement, endosymbiotic gene transfer, protein import and host control of transmission, organellogenesis and organelle loss, and eukaryogenesis. The ecology of a partnership is ecology (ADR-055).
Thermodynamics (0) — the second law and its extensions read for themselves — entropy and entropy production, irreversibility, nonequilibrium steady states and their stability, dissipative structures, fluctuation theorems and stochastic thermodynamics, and the thermodynamics of computation and of life (ADR-020).
Operations research (1) — optimization of real systems — routing, scheduling, facility location, combinatorial algorithms: 085
Society and governance (4) — law, politics, policy, security and institutions — court records, doctrine, democratic theory, information operations: 017 · 064 · 066 · 085
Information theory (9) — entropy, channels, coding and capacity read for themselves — including information-theoretic accounts of work, memory and inference outside machine learning: 010 · 028 · 034 · 043 · 057 · 062 · 064 · 065 · 068
Representation learning (4) — how learned systems come to represent their data — self-supervised and contrastive objectives, spectral embeddings, information bottlenecks, knowledge-graph embeddings, and whether representations converge: 011 · 025 · 032 · 098
Learning theory (0) — why learning generalizes and how it proceeds — compression and description length, Kolmogorov complexity and sufficient statistics, rate–distortion and PAC-style bounds, model selection; and training dynamics: solvable models of learning trajectories, stages, plateaus and phase transitions in training, and the implicit bias of optimisation. A work whose subject is how to train a model better is ML practice and goes to the anthology (ADR-036).
Compositionality (2) — how the structure and meaning of a whole come from its parts and how they are combined — the principle of compositionality and compositional semantics, the emergence of compositional structure in languages under transmission, and composition and binding in learned models (generalization to unseen combinations, attribute binding, composing distributions or concepts). A work on making a model generalize compositionally is ML practice and goes to the anthology (ADR-031): 090 · 091
Mathematical statistics (1) — the theory of statistical inference read for itself — comparison and sufficiency of experiments (Blackwell, Le Cam deficiency), statistical decision theory, the sufficiency theorems (Fisher–Neyman, Basu, Bahadur) and bounds on estimation. Bayesian modelling is probabilistic-modeling (ADR-031): 058
Information retrieval (1) — finding what is relevant to a need — document and query representation, relevance and aboutness, ranking and feedback, and the geometric, probabilistic and logical models of retrieval: 056
Databases and data structures (0) — how stored data is organized so that it can be found and kept current — physical database design and index selection, materialized views and the choice of which answers to precompute, adaptive and self-organizing structures, lower bounds on lookup, caching and paging; and the cost of organizing ahead of use against organizing in use. Read for itself, not as ML practice: learned indexes and other machine-learning approaches go to the anthology (ADR-045).
Design rationale (3) — recording the reasoning behind a design or decision as it is made — issues, positions and arguments, options and criteria (IBIS, gIBIS, QOC and their successors) — and why such capture systems are or are not used: who bears the cost of capture and who gets the benefit, premature formalization, cognitive overhead, and the groupware adoption problems behind them (ADR-030): 052 · 089 · 091
Social science (1) — economics, psychology, anthropology and sociology — empirical and theoretical work on people and societies that is not law or policy: 075
Causality (4) — causation and the structure of causal relations — causal order, definite and indefinite, and its combinatorics, topology and geometry; sheaf- and process-theoretic accounts of causality; causal models, causal inference and interventionist accounts of what a causal relation is; and the metaphysics of causation — exclusion, mental causation, causal emergence and closure, reciprocal causation (ADR-035): 039 · 057 · 058 · 067
Pragmatics (0) — language in use — speech acts and illocutionary force, assertion and common ground, presupposition, dynamic and update semantics, footing and stance in discourse, and probabilistic models of speakers and listeners (rational speech acts); what an utterance does, beyond what it says (ADR-034).
Myth and folklore (0) — myths, folktales and their variants as objects of study — morphology of the folktale, structural and transformational analysis of myth, and the computational modelling of either (ADR-034).
Translation (1) — translation and its theory — equivalence and its kinds (formal, dynamic, functional), interpretive resemblance, register and quality assessment, translation as skopos-driven action, intersemiotic translation between media, and what a translation preserves or changes (ADR-033): 084
Linguistics (9) — the study of language itself — morphology, lexicalism, word segmentation, syntax and semantics as linguists pose them, not as models encode them: 001 · 005 · 009 · 013 · 016 · 018 · 029 · 030 · 035
Metaphysics (4) — what exists and what it is to exist — causation, emergence and levels, laws, time — as a philosophical question (group: philosophy): 059 · 087 · 088 · 093
Mereology (0) — parts and wholes — composition, individuation of systems and collectives (group: philosophy).
Agency (20) — what it is to be an agent — goals, action, control and the capacity to act — in organisms, collectives or machines. An agent is not thereby an individual, a self or a person (ADR-024); how an agent’s behaviour is integrated is behavioral-integration, and governing oneself by one’s own standards is self-governance (group: philosophy): 003 · 017 · 019 · 020 · 023 · 044 · 047 · 048 · 051 · 055 · 060 · 063 · 074 · 079 · 080 · 085 · 086 · 094 · 099 · 100
Individuation (11) — what makes something one thing, and the same thing over time or across descriptions — individuation, numerical identity and diversity, individuality and persistence of things of any kind, biological individuality and organisational closure. Selves are self and persons are personhood (group: philosophy; ADR-015, ADR-024): 014 · 022 · 040 · 041 · 049 · 063 · 070 · 071 · 074 · 084 · 088
Self (3) — what a self is — the minimal, bodily and pre-reflective self, self-models and the sense of being a subject, the self as process or as context, and whether machines or groups can be selves. Not the person, which is personhood (group: philosophy; ADR-024): 045 · 072 · 075
Personhood (1) — what a person is and what makes one persist — personal identity over time, psychological continuity and what matters in survival, persons as bearers of reasons, rights and responsibility. Not the self, which is self (group: philosophy; ADR-024): 083
Behavioral integration (2) — how an organism’s many control systems come to act as one — action selection and competition between systems (habitual and goal-directed, automatic and willed), hierarchical and feedback control, intertemporal conflict and self-control, and evidence accumulation to a decision. One of four unities kept apart (ADR-024): 050 · 061
Phenomenal unity (1) — the unity of experience — what makes simultaneous experiences one subject’s, and how a self-model or a perspective binds them. One of four unities kept apart (group: philosophy; ADR-024): 072
Narrative unity (0) — the unity a life has as a story — narrative identity, the narrative self, autobiographical reasoning, and the claim and counter-claim that a self is the story told of it. One of four unities kept apart (group: philosophy; ADR-024).
Self-governance (13) — governing oneself by standards that are one’s own — identification and wholeheartedness, planning agency and policies, self-constitution, autonomy and authenticity, and the empirical psychology of self-endorsed motives. One of four unities kept apart (group: philosophy; ADR-024): 006 · 012 · 023 · 047 · 048 · 053 · 060 · 061 · 066 · 067 · 076 · 099 · 100
Phenomenology (0) — the first-person description of experience as a method — the philosophical tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), its use in the sciences of mind, and the theories that take their data from it (group: philosophy; ADR-016).
Social ontology (10) — what social facts, groups, institutions and social kinds are, and what makes them exist — collective intentionality, joint commitment, status functions, convention, social construction, and whether groups can be agents or minds (group: philosophy; ADR-017): 006 · 038 · 040 · 053 · 071 · 074 · 080 · 084 · 086 · 096
Social identity (1) — the psychology of group membership — social identity and self-categorization theory, how people categorize themselves and others and when a group identity becomes salient, identification and its measurement, in-group bias and intergroup relations, rivalry, recategorization and common in-group identity, group-based emotion, crowds and fandom. What a group is, as ontology, is social-ontology; here it is how people come to see themselves and act as members (ADR-062): 096
Altruism and self-interest (0) — whether and how action can aim at another’s good rather than one’s own — psychological egoism and its rivals, the empathy–altruism debate and self–other merging, inclusion of others in the self and identity fusion, team reasoning and group-directed preferences, identity in the utility function, the evolution of unselfish behaviour (kin, reciprocal and group selection), and the extent of the self as it bears on what counts as self-interest (ADR-062).
Future generations (0) — what the living owe, and why they care about, people who will live after them — longtermism and existential risk, intergenerational justice, the non-identity problem and person-affecting views, population ethics, discounting of future welfare, and the psychology of concern for the future: legacy motivation, generativity, symbolic immortality and continuity with one’s future self (ADR-063).
Moral psychology (1) — morality as a natural phenomenon — moral judgement, emotion and norms, and their evolution, development and variation across cultures; descriptive, where ethics is normative (group: philosophy; ADR-018): 081
Psychopathology and treatment (0) — what a mental disorder is and how psychological treatment changes it — medical models of illness (biomedical, biopsychosocial, network), the philosophy of psychiatry, functional and transdiagnostic accounts of psychopathology such as experiential avoidance and psychological flexibility, and psychotherapies and their mechanisms of change (ADR-021).
Motivation (3) — why organisms act and persist — intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, needs, goals and values, the internalization of regulation, and the difference between autonomous and controlled motives; the empirical counterpart of the philosophy of autonomy under agency (ADR-023):
050 · 060 · 076
Well-being (0) — how well a life goes for the one living it, as psychology measures it — subjective and eudaimonic well-being, flourishing, vitality and meaning in life, and what predicts them (ADR-025).
Learning and conditioning (0) — how organisms learn from contingencies and consequences — Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning, reinforcement and reward learning in brains, habit and goal-directed control, behaviour analysis and relational responding. Not machine learning, which is learning-theory or the anthology (ADR-025).
Psychometrics (1) — measuring minds — scales, reliability and validity, latent-variable and network models of psychological constructs, and model-based estimation of cognitive parameters (ADR-025): 039
Philosophy of biology (3) — what life, organisms and biological functions are — teleology and function, organisation and closure, biological individuality and autonomy, and the demarcation of the living (group: philosophy; ADR-025): 063 · 068 · 070
Embodied cognition (0) — cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted or extended — enactivism and sense-making, coordination dynamics, situated robotics, and mind as organism–environment coupling (group: philosophy; ADR-025).
Free will (2) — free will and volition, as philosophy and as science — compatibilism and its rivals, manipulation and responsibility, and the neuroscience of voluntary action such as the readiness potential (group: philosophy; ADR-025): 099 · 100
Model comparison (0) — choosing between models by their evidence — the marginal likelihood and Bayes factors, the Savage–Dickey density ratio for nested models, Occam factors and the evidence framework, Bayesian model reduction and structure learning, and information criteria and free energies for singular models (ADR-026).
Information geometry (0) — the geometry of statistical models — the Fisher information as a metric, natural gradient, curvature and its Kronecker and block structure, and the spectra of Fisher and Hessian matrices in learned models (ADR-026).
Loss landscapes (0) — the geometry of trained solutions in weight space — mode connectivity, linear and along curves, barriers between minima and the permutation symmetries that hide or remove them, re-basin alignment, star domains and connecting simplexes, local versus global landscape structure, and model merging as its use (ADR-027).
Control theory (0) — the analysis and design of feedback — stability and Lyapunov certificates, invariance, viability and barrier certificates, input-to-state stability and small-gain conditions, contraction, adaptive, dual and safe control, and controller synthesis under constraints; dynamical systems without a control input stay with complex-systems (ADR-066).
Ethics (4) — moral philosophy — what is owed, permitted or good — including applied ethics of technology and institutions (group: philosophy): 012 · 059 · 081 · 083
Consciousness (3) — experience and its theories — phenomenal consciousness, its measures and its attribution to animals or machines (group: philosophy): 072 · 073 · 082
Cognition (8) — the mind as information processing — perception, memory, reasoning and cognitive strategies — as studied by cognitive science and philosophy of mind (group: philosophy): 027 · 055 · 073 · 079 · 082 · 092 · 095 · 098
Emotion and affect (4) — emotions, feelings and affect — what they are, their bodily and neural basis (including the homeostatic and interoceptive states feelings are said to report), their role in decision, memory and behaviour, and whether they ground consciousness (group: philosophy; ADR-014): 076 · 077 · 078 · 094
Philosophy of science (5) — what science is and what its theories say about the world — realism and structural realism, explanation, causation and evidence, the interpretation of physical theories (group: philosophy): 037 · 038 · 065 · 087 · 089
Epistemology (10) — knowledge, belief and evidence — justification and rational credence, the value of knowledge, testimony, trust and expertise, and social and inductive-risk questions about evidence (group: philosophy): 052 · 056 · 064 · 069 · 079 · 089 · 092 · 095 · 097 · 098
Logic (0) — valid inference and its formal theories — propositional and model-theoretic structures, proof and consequence, and inferentialist accounts of meaning (group: philosophy).
Philosophy of mathematics (0) — what mathematics is about and how we know it — mathematical structuralism and ontology, the nature of proof and construction, and its history from Descartes to Kant and after (group: philosophy).
Philosophy of language (32) — meaning, content and reference as philosophy poses them — theories of meaning, meaning holism, assertion and whether machines assert, and conceptual change (group: philosophy): 001 · 002 · 004 · 005 · 007 · 008 · 009 · 010 · 011 · 013 · 014 · 015 · 016 · 018 · 021 · 022 · 025 · 026 · 027 · 028 · 029 · 030 · 031 · 032 · 033 · 034 · 035 · 036 · 037 · 040 · 042 · 043
Religion (0) — religion as a subject — its relation to science, religious belief and practice, and how religious practitioners are treated.
Anthology candidate (0) — a curation flag, not a subject — somebody judged the Anthology of the SOTA may want this work as well; it stays here unless a transfer is decided, and is never a primary topic (ADR-005, ADR-048; group: flags).
By status: Active (73) · Proposed (15) · Deferred (2) · Superseded (10) · Rejected (0)
By line: Distributed agency (26) · Will-organization (13) · Organizational affect (2) · Authenticity and concordance (2) · Contextual pragmatic information transport (36) · Nucleating an argument (7) · Evidence for experience (3) · How training finds structure (1) · Formal apparatus (8)
What the status column means in this scheme — the words are luria’s, the meanings are this project’s.
| Status | Means | |
|---|---|---|
Active | Active | In force — the current answer, and what a citation should normally point at |
Proposed | Proposed | Not in force yet — an open question, so citing it as settled is the thing the report catches |
Deferred | Deferred | Not in force and not being worked on; the question is real and the answer is waiting on something |
Superseded | Superseded | No longer in force because something replaced it; the successor is named in the field, not the prose |
Rejected | Rejected | No longer in force and nothing replaced it — kept because a rejection is worth being able to point at |
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| TERM-001 | fidelity, as the number of preserved constraints | A4, reading Hofstadter: fidelity as preservation along several dimensions (semantic, formal, rhyme, tone, pragmatic), traded off on a Pareto frontier. Undercut in the same reply by the mother’s translation. | Superseded — by TERM-013 |
| TERM-002 | communicative object, as a compatible family of local sections | A78, after the owner’s U29 pointer to the record: an object is a compatible family of local sections of the event presheaf over a cover of jointly accessible observables, with no global assignment presupposed. The manuscript §3. | Superseded — by TERM-042 |
| TERM-003 | will, as a second- or higher-order attractor | Will defined dynamically: a higher-order attractor that stabilizes which first-order regimes govern action. The owner’s operational definition at U34; replaced by will-organization once the account became agent-indexed. | Superseded — by TERM-023 |
| TERM-004 | equivariance | A105: a representation F is equivariant when F(g·s) = ρ_g F(s), with invariance the case ρ_g = identity. “equivariance may be the more general principle for translation”, as when irony in a text becomes posture in an image. The manuscript §4. | Active |
| TERM-005 | frame, as an interpretive lens on the original | A11: the frame through which the original is reconstructed, deciding “what kind of thing the original fundamentally is”. A silent narrowing of the owner’s sense, corrected at U7. | Superseded — by TERM-035 |
| TERM-006 | organizational authenticity | A graded property: how far an agent’s operative commitments arise through, remain integrated with, and are answerable to its own constitutive organization (A252). Set aside with its line on 2026-10-05. | Deferred |
| TERM-007 | fidelity, as preserving the dynamics of interpretation | A30: a faithful rendering makes interpreting-then-mapping agree with mapping-then-interpreting, T_τ(f) Φ ≈ Φ T_f. Adds to distribution matching rather than replacing it. The origin of the manuscript’s intertwining defects (§9). | Active |
| TERM-008 v3 | transport | The owner’s word at U20 for the map Φ from source to target communicative states: directed, possibly stochastic and non- invertible, required only to get within ε. Renames A48’s “state correspondence” and A49’s “admissible correspondence”. The manuscript’s central term (§6). | Active |
| TERM-009 v2 | levels, as levels at which observables exist | The owner at U28: the levels (linguistic, conceptual, pragmatic, interactional, dynamical) organize observables, not objects, and may form a partial order. Manuscript §2: “These observations are not ordered into one strict ontological ladder.” | Active |
| TERM-010 | fidelity, as a weighted three-term directed distortion | A100’s “mathematical centerpiece”: minimize observational, decision and structural distortion subject to a rate budget I(U;V) ≤ R. The manuscript §6 keeps the three terms, drops the rate constraint, swaps the weights and demotes it to “a flexible directed fidelity functional”. | Active |
| TERM-011 | frame, as inferred from evidence | A44–A48: a frame the interpreter infers from linguistic and contextual evidence, P(z | c), between the frame that obtains (a property of the situation) and the intervention that tells or asks. The middle of three operations A45 said “should not be conflated”. | Active |
| TERM-012 | cross-scale concordance | A graded relational property of how an encompassing agent’s governing organization stands to the capacities of its constituents and dependencies (A249). Defined at least five ways in the exchange; set aside as future work. | Deferred |
| TERM-013 | fidelity, as matching pragmatic signatures | A18: a rendering is faithful when its pragmatic signature in the target frame matches the source’s in its own frame, I_g(u_g) ≈ I_f(u_f). Replaced at A24 by distribution matching over contexts. | Superseded — by TERM-021 |
| TERM-014 | communicative object, as an observational equivalence class | C6 Appendix A: “an equivalence class of situations relative to a chosen family of measurements, or a compatible constraint family”. An equivalence class needs a shared space of situations, which the sheaf move had just given up; the manuscript keeps both readings side by side (§3). | Active |
| TERM-015 | fidelity, as graded, directed transport distortion | U20 and A50: fidelity is how little a transport distorts selected structure, within ε, and need not be symmetric or transitive; equivalence is its zero-distortion limit. The manuscript’s graded fidelity (§6, §12). | Active |
| TERM-016 | frame, as a pragmatic frame of reference | A18: an “interpretive and expressive coordinate system” within which a communicative act is realized, operationalised as f = (S, A, K, N, G) and made of public conventions. Built for the relativity analogy, and given up twice: at A24 for a measurement context, at A30 for an operator. | Superseded — by TERM-031, TERM-026 |
| TERM-017 | precedence, jurisdiction and suspension | Three relations among rules that are easily conflated: precedence orders applicable constraints, jurisdiction governs which apply, suspension governs when an applicable one may be disabled (Section 5.3). | Active |
| TERM-018 | framing intervention | A39 §3.2: an action that changes the conditions under which an utterance is interpreted. Telling a reader who the speaker is and asking the reader to take the utterance a certain way are different interventions. Splits the A30 operator sense of frame. | Active |
| TERM-019 | action-generating regime | A relatively stable organization capable of producing a characteristic pattern of agent-level action under appropriate conditions — desires, habits, plans, policies, institutional operating modes (Section 1). | Active |
| TERM-020 | protective lock-in | A protective regime that, by reorganizing ordinary activity, generates the conditions that justify its own continuation and reduces the capacity to leave it (Section 6.1). | Active |
| TERM-021 | fidelity, as context-indexed distribution matching | A24: D(τ) = Σ_C w_C d(e_C^source, e_τ(C)^target), the weighted distance between judgement distributions in corresponding contexts. The origin of the manuscript’s L_obs (§6). | Active |
| TERM-022 | communicative object, as an intersection of constraint regions | The owner at U28 and A75: an observation o with value v picks out R(o, v) = {s : o(s) = v}, and an object is the intersection of such regions, generally a region rather than a point. Generalized at U29 to local sections; the manuscript keeps it as the special case with a shared ambient space (§2). | Superseded — by TERM-002 |
| TERM-023 v2 | will-organization | The maintained organization of relations governing the conditions under which an agent’s available action-generating regimes acquire, retain, lose, or alter practical efficacy (Section 3.2). | Active |
| TERM-024 v3 | noncommutativity, of events and of operations | A30’s disambiguation: noncommuting events or projectors (P_A P_B ≠ P_B P_A), which rule out a joint distribution for sharp measurements, versus noncommuting operations on probability states, which classical stochastic maps also show. | Active |
| TERM-025 | frame, as a parameterized family of contexts | A49: c_f = Γ(f, c_0), a frame f realized relative to a background context c_0, inducing Q_θ,f,u(y) = P_θ(y | Γ(f, c_0), u). Formalizes the owner’s U17 “parameterized frame”. Gone by outline v4, which returned to the tuple; absent from the manuscript. | Active |
| TERM-026 | frame, as an operation on an interpretive state | A30: applying a frame transforms the interpretive state that later frames act on, so frames can fail to commute. Survives as the manuscript’s stochastic framing operations (§9). | Active — by TERM-018 |
| TERM-027 | cultural attractor | A stable endpoint of repeated reconstruction, read as “a shared decoding convention rather than a preserved historical object” (A110 §20). Used from A82 to C6 (whose §8 heading has it); the word does not appear in the manuscript. | Active |
| TERM-028 | fidelity, as inferential sufficiency | A86 §3, set against fidelity as representational similarity: a rendering is faithful to the extent that it preserves the information needed to make the relevant distinctions about the communicative situation. Made operational by Blackwell’s order; the manuscript’s decision term (§5, §6). | Active |
| TERM-029 | frame, as the position a rendering is delivered from | The owner’s sense at U6: the frame “from which it is being delivered”. Silently narrowed at A11 to an interpretive lens, and restored at U7. | Superseded — by TERM-005 |
| TERM-030 | frame, as a configuration of the communicative situation | A38–A39: a pragmatic frame is a configuration of the social and interpretive conditions of an utterance, c = (u, s, a, k, n, g, h), “more than an analyst’s interpretive label”, and distinct from any intervention that changes those conditions. | Active |
| TERM-031 | frame, as a measurement context | A24: a communicative situation C = (u, s, a, k, g) indexing the distribution of pragmatic judgements, P(J = j | C). Footing becomes one coordinate of the context. Survives as the manuscript’s measurement contexts (§3). | Active — by TERM-030 |
| TERM-032 | levels, as a hierarchy of latent representations | A73, answering U27: surface realization, conceptual structure, pragmatic operation and communicative configuration, z(u, c) = (z_lex, z_concept, z_act, z_social), with the relational configuration on top. Replaced at U28 by levels of observables. | Superseded — by TERM-009 |
| TERM-033 | fidelity, as observational equivalence over response trajectories | A35 §8 and A39 §5.3: two systems are faithful when corresponding intervention sequences yield matching distributions of observed responses, P_o(Y_1:k | a_1:k) ≈ P_t(Y’_1:k | a’_1:k), with no shared latent state required. Put “at the center of the formal theory” at A39. | Active — by TERM-015 |
| TERM-034 | fidelity, as selective preservation of decision-relevant observational information under a communication constraint, relative to an interpreter | The crystallized argument’s one-sentence definition (A108 §12, “Fourth conclusion”). The manuscript never defines fidelity in a sentence: §6 gives a “flexible directed fidelity functional” and §5 the decision comparison. | Active |
| TERM-035 | frame, as the delivery frame: interpretive, enunciative and performative | A12, after the owner’s U7 correction: who is saying it, to whom, from what position, in what social context, with what attitude, split into interpretive, enunciative and performative frames. | Superseded — by TERM-016 |
| TERM-036 | fidelity, as preservation of selected observables and structural symmetries | A105, after the owner’s U37 objection: “Fidelity ≈ preservation of selected observables and structural symmetries”, “a proposed operational criterion, relative to a selected class of observables, not a universal identity”. The manuscript states it in §4, beside the §6 functional rather than in it. | Active |
| TERM-037 | observable | Manuscript §2: “a reproducible elicitation or coding procedure that assigns outcomes to communicative realizations”, some “constituted through contrasts with alternatives”. New in C7; the crystallized argument spoke only of observational procedures. | Active |
| TERM-038 | descriptive, causal and constitutive relations of a communicative act | A three-way distinction drawn by the assistant at A191 §11: relations that are observed, relations that say what would happen under changed conditions, and relations that make an act the kind of act it is. It recurs at A203 §16 and A218 §2, and A191 §4 pairs it with three kinds of identification. None of the three entails the next. | Active |
| TERM-039 | measurement context, as the elicitation protocol that enters the response and not the situation | The third of the three roles that “frame” was split into at A125 §1, after the communicative situation (TERM-030) and the framing intervention (TERM-018): the conditions under which a judgement is elicited. In A129 §1’s model it enters the judgement, not the interpreter’s state. It appears five times, so it gets a code. Its name collides with TERM-031’s. | Active |
| TERM-040 v2 | communicative kind, as a repeatable relational organization that numerically distinct events realize, distinct from a token and from a structural position | A repeatable organization of relations among participants, norms, commitments and expected responses, which numerically distinct events (an utterance, its translation, a picture of it) can each realize. It recurs from A191 through A218, and it replaced “communicative object” in A218, which never uses the older phrase. A218 gives it no formal definition. | Active |
| TERM-041 | character-like structural signature, as a realization-independent invariant of a communicative kind, called a character only when it is the trace of a specified representation | A proposed invariant χ_A of a communicative kind, the same across the kind’s realizations and required to keep independently specified pragmatic and decision-relevant distinctions. A203 §36 fixed the usage: “character” literally only for the trace character of a specified representation, otherwise “character-like structural signature”. None has yet been constructed for any communicative case. | Active |
| TERM-042 | communicative object, as a context-indexed system of empirical constraints over a cover | The assistant found TERM-002 vacuous at A125 §2. At the owner’s U41 request (“double click on this”) it rewrote the definition at A129 §2. The object is the empirical data over a cover, supports or distributions with their restrictions. Whether it is compatible on overlaps and whether it extends globally are things to find out, not part of the definition. | Active |
| TERM-043 v2 | fidelity, as a profile of directed distortions compared component by component | The owner agreed at U41 to unify the record’s fidelity lineages, and A129 §3 made one transport with several tests. The profile had four components at A129, five at A151, A178 and A218, and an optional sixth at A203. Transports are compared componentwise; a scalar exists only once a task fixes weights. Supersedes TERM-010’s weighted scalar as the foundation; TERM-015 and TERM-021 stay in force as what the components measure. | Active |
| TERM-044 v3 | agent (at a level of description) | A factor of a system, at a stated level of description and for a stated target, that is one system there, whose behaviour is better described as pursuing goals than as an input-output device by more than the Occam cost, and whose policy would adapt if its actions’ consequences changed. The general tier, wider than a willed agent and narrower than a control system. | Active |
| TERM-045 v7 | self, and which sense | The record uses “self” in at least seven senses. ADR-024 reserves the topic word for being a subject. This term lists the senses so that a claim using “self” says which: subject, dispositional (extended), persisting, narrative, self-governing, integrated and presented. A claim that leaves the sense open is stated in this term’s words as “self (sense open)”. | Active |
| TERM-046 | notation for the threshold, drive and unity criteria | One place for the symbols used across the threshold criterion, the drive profile and the unity and persistence claims of 2026-10-11: δ, ε, τ, d′, Occam, D, G, Φ and γ. It records that δ/ε is used in two senses, a spectral gap against off-block coupling and a posterior effect against its uncertainty, and that treating them as one is an assumption carried over from MOM-CLM-160. | Active |
| TERM-047 v2 | jurisdiction of a will-organization | The set of action-generating regimes whose practical efficacy a given will-organization governs: those for which it maintains the conditions under which they acquire, retain, lose or alter efficacy. Its outer reach, as distinct from TERM-017’s jurisdiction, which is one relation inside a will-organization. | Active |
| TERM-048 | willed agent | An agent (TERM-044) whose behaviour is governed by a will-organization (TERM-023) over several action-generating regimes, and which is individuated as that will-organization’s jurisdiction (TERM-047). The middle tier between agency and selfhood; the owner’s name, 2026-10-11. | Active |
| TERM-049 | combined form | A candidate system drawn from more than one member (two dancers, a person and a tool, a firm’s teams), counted as one system relative to a stated target while it clears the threshold criterion of CLAIM-157. The record’s neutral word for what such a whole is, used before asking whether it is an agent or a self. | Active |
| TERM-050 | intrapersonal synchronization | An agent’s action-generating regimes are synchronized on a course of action over a horizon when each ranks it first from every delay at which it is evaluated within that horizon. The course then becomes effective without any regime being overridden, bargained with or suspended. The regimes are desynchronized where their valuations cross. | Active |
| TERM-051 v2 | drive profile | How the drive of a described system is apportioned, at a time and for a stated macro-variable and target, along two axes. Within a level: one member drives, the members drive each other, or the drive is diffuse. Across levels: aggregate, top-down, bidirectional or emergent, read from the information decomposition’s downward-causation and causal-decoupling terms. A profile is time-indexed. | Active |
| TERM-052 | crystallized argument | The owner’s term: the argument in its terminal state at a given point in a discussion, as matured as it has yet become. “Crystallization” is that maturing. Asking for the crystallized argument asks for a readout of the current terminal state, not for a new act of formation. | Active |
| TERM-053 | endorsement, between an organization’s processes: any effect one process has on another’s share of future influence, of which an explicit vote is one case | The owner’s “vote” at U2, generalized at A5 §7 to an effective causal relation. Process i endorses process j in region x to the extent that an intervention of i raises j’s chance of acquiring influence there. Opposition is negative endorsement. Attending to j’s output, keeping it active, passing it resources and suppressing its rivals are all endorsement. The term is about authority among processes. It is not Frankfurt’s identification with a desire. | Active |
| TERM-054 | canvas temperature: the rate and spatial spread of placements that follow no coalition’s plan, modelled as a stochastic field on the canvas rather than as agents | The owner’s proposal: treat unaffiliated participation on r/place as a property of the canvas, a noise field T(x, t) that corrupts any pattern left unmaintained, instead of as a population of operators. That makes the need for maintenance explicit. T falls over the event as uninvested participants leave. Which placements count as unaffiliated is relative to the plans in play, so the field is defined against a set of plans. | Active |
| TERM-055 | operational availability, of a resource for an action: the chance that an agent–environment system, given the cue it actually has, deploys the resource for the task before the deadline | A17 §3’s α, with A19’s cue added. Named because the exchange used it in five turns (A16 to A19, and A23 §II) under “available”, “accessible” and “deployable”. The term separates the deployability of a resource from its presence and from knowing it is present (CLAIM-296). | Active |
| TERM-056 | question drift: a provisional answer becoming part of the question an inquiry is pursuing, as distinct from query drift, in which the queries move away from a question that stays fixed | A21 §3’s distinction, used again at A23 VI.C. Classical retrieval names query drift (LIT-1079). An agent that rewrites its own task can drift in the question. The nucleating-argument line studies drift in concepts (CLAIM-177); this is drift in what is being asked. | Active |
| TERM-057 | transfer entropy: how much the last l values of a source reduce uncertainty about a target’s next value beyond the target’s own last k values, I(X_{t+1}; Y_t^{(l)} | X_t^{(k)}), a directed predictive quantity that depends on k, l and any conditioning series, not a measure of information flow and not an intervention effect | The record names transfer entropy in its readings of Granger causality, causal emergence, colloid dynamics, IIT and the global workspace, and the documents use different history conventions (NOTE-053’s k-histories, NOTE-788’s single target value at lag τ). This fixes the word from Schreiber (NOTE-940), with the history lengths explicit, and says what it must not be confused with: flow (CLAIM-335), directed information, time-delayed mutual information, interventional flow and Granger causality. | Active |
| TERM-058 | Granger causality: the past of one series improving the prediction of another’s next value beyond the past of everything else in a stated information set, a predictive relation relative to that set and its lags, and not by itself the effect of an intervention | The record names Granger causality in its readings of transfer entropy (NOTE-053), causal emergence (NOTE-010, NOTE-726, NOTE-791) and IIT (NOTE-122), always through other authors. This fixes the word: relative to an information set, predictive, and interventional only under the conditions of THEORY-704. Defined from Barnett, Barrett and Seth, Seth, and Eichler and Didelez; Granger (1969) itself is Unavailable. | Active |
| TERM-059 | relational normative realism, as frame-, order-, scale- and perspective-relative normative realism: the position that a normative judgment indexed to a frame, an organizational or reflective order, a scale, a perspective and a standard is correct or incorrect whatever the judge prefers, and that which frames, perspectives and standards are admissible is itself constrained, the second of which the record has not established | The owner’s name, U18 of the exchange of 2026-10-17: “so maybe something like a frame/order/scale/perspectival-relative normative realism?” A18 proposed “relational normative realism” as the short name and the owner’s wording “as its explicit technical characterization”, and split “order” into organizational and reflective order. The term names the position. It does not assert it. In particular its third condition, constraints on admissible perspectives, is unmet: without it the position is conditional objectivity, not realism about the standards themselves. The indexing is CLAIM-363’s thesis, and the realism about standards is QUESTION-129’s open question. | Active |
| TERM-060 v2 | frustration, of an organization’s demands: the failure of the demands it maintains to be jointly realizable under its admissible transformations and its governance | A33 of the exchange of 2026-10-17, at the owner’s U33, made ordinal by the owner’s U37 correction. The demands an organization maintains are frustrated when no admissible transformation meets them all (structural) or when one exists and the organization’s governance does not select it (governance-induced). In its basic form it is an empty intersection of acceptance sets and needs no common scale. It is distinct from strain, where the demands are jointly realizable at a cost, and from distress, a possible integrated response to either. It is not CLAIM-153’s physics sense, though it shares that sense’s three-demand minimal obstruction. | Active |
| TERM-061 | practical synchronization: an agent’s action-generating regimes, relative to a context and a horizon, sustaining mutually compatible courses of activity through their own interactions, without recurrent overriding arbitration by a higher level, whether or not they rank the same course first | The broader sense the owner asked for at U45 of the exchange of 2026-10-17 (“we should probably propose a more general definition for this term”), defined from A45. Regimes are practically synchronized when their own coupling keeps their activity compatible without a higher level routinely settling their conflicts, though their rankings may differ. TERM-050’s sense, all regimes ranking the same course first, is not a special case of it: agreement in rankings needs no coupling, and coupling needs no agreement. The two are separate dimensions, and TERM-050 stays Active beside it. | Active |
| TERM-062 v2 | causal state, of a process relative to a target future: a class of pasts that induce the same conditional law over a declared target future, the coarsest prescient partition of the pasts; the causal-state machine organizes those classes and the transitions they induce, and the ε-machine and the υ-machine are that machine for different choices of source pasts and target | Crutchfield and Shalizi’s causal states (THEORY-756, from LIT-1260) and Rosas et al.’s υ-machine (THEORY-820), under one definition with the target and the source of the pasts explicit. Used in THEORY-820, THEORY-756 and CLAIM-152 with no TERM. A13 of the exchange of 2026-10-20: “A TERM would make that concept discoverable before someone knows which theorem to search for”, and A14 asked that it say whose histories are taken. It is the owner’s U13 category exactly, “definitions we’ve crystallized that are not currently in conflict”. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. A13 called it “predictive state”; the record’s word is kept. | Active |
| TERM-063 v2 | agent, as an individual that is the active source of modulations of its coupling with its environment and regulates them against norms its own organization sets (Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde) | THEORY-071’s three conditions (LIT-566, read in NOTE-458) as a candidate definition of “agent” beside TERM-044. The owner at U11 of the exchange of 2026-10-20 asked for “(potentially competing) TERM entries”; A11’s worked example was this one (“This entry could have rivals: [TERM-044] once filed”), and A12 and A14 kept it. It rivals TERM-044 because the two give different verdicts on cases the record holds: the thermostat with its designers and a trained policy’s training process pass TERM-044 and fail here. Proposed: recorded, not adopted. THEORY-071’s own promotion test would settle it. | Proposed |
| TERM-064 v4 | legibility, of a distinction to an observer for a task: whether the observer, with the rules, categories and resources it actually has, can recover the distinction from what it is given and bring it to bear on the task; a relation among a representation, an observer’s rule class, its resources and a task, bounded above by what the source makes possible for an ideal receiver, and directed, since what is legible to a governing institution and what of its governing is legible to others are different relations | The owner’s, U22 of the exchange of 2026-10-20: “a theme we seem to be touching on that I’m not sure is laid out clearly in our current account is the role of legibility”. A22 defined it and proposed three TERMs; one is filed, with the regime and the direction in its body. Its formal core is CLAIM-199’s usable information. CLAIM-081 holds the record’s earlier use. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. It recurs through A23 to A27. | Active |
| TERM-065 v3 | effective-description regime: the system, query family, intervention family, resource bounds, tolerance and horizon under which a candidate description’s adequacy is assessed, ℛ = (X, 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, ε, τ), kept apart from the description T it evaluates, so that rival descriptions are compared under one regime and whether each is adequate, Adequate(T; ℛ), is settled once the regime is stated | The exchange of 2026-10-20 returned to this signature five times. A3 proposed the six-tuple 𝔈 = (X, T, 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, τ) so that an ablation could not “succeed simply by moving the goalposts”. A5 added the tolerance ε in the predicate Adequate(T; 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, ε, τ): “Adequacy is relational, but whether the relation holds can be objective.” A11 named it, and A12, A13 and A14 kept the seven-tuple; A13: “our own organizing convention rather than an established term of art”. The owner’s second review took T out of the tuple, ℛ = (X, 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, ε, τ), so that descriptions are compared under one regime. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. It would add a name for what CLAIM-152, CLAIM-302, CLAIM-387 and THEORY-424 each relativize to; it replaces nothing. | Active |
| TERM-066 v5 | interpretive capture, of an organization’s evaluation: the condition in which the processes that read evidence, score constituents and allocate authority are driven by the interpretation or party being evaluated more than by evidence independent of it, so that authority amplifies or holds an interpretation without a gain in fidelity; judged against a standard specified apart from the captured process | The record uses “capture” in several entries (CLAIM-330, CLAIM-340, CLAIM-342, CLAIM-359, QUESTION-100, CLAIM-277) with no definition, and the exchange of 2026-10-20 used it at A20, A21, A22, A25 and A26 in two senses: a loop’s outcome, and an institution’s diversion from its purpose. Proposed: the first, with the second’s requirement of an outside standard. Not adopted; not concentration, and not merited trust. | Proposed |
| TERM-067 v4 | governance-response profile, of a state for a declared family of interventions on the mechanisms that govern efficacy: the tuple of its response kernels, J_I(s) = (K_i(· | s))_{i∈I} with K_i(y | s) = P(Y^(i) = y | S = s); a description is governance-response sufficient for (I, Y) when the profile factors through it | Defined at A15 §2, A16 §4 and A17 §4.1 of the exchange of 2026-10-20, and reused at A18 and A23. A15 called sufficiency for it “a direct application of the factorization criterion [CLAIM-350], not an independently established new theorem”; A16 §14 “a governance-specific causal preservation test, not necessarily a wholly independent kind of fidelity”. It is not TERM-043’s causal component with the identity correspondence, as this entry first said: that component compares interventional laws, and is zero for a coarse-graining that loses the response of every state (CLAIM-399). It is a fixed-target, state-conditional sufficiency. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. It names what CLAIM-407 is stated in; it replaces nothing. | Active |
| TERM-068 v2 | closure, and which sense | The record uses “closure” in at least eight senses and no entry says which is meant. This term lists them so that a claim using the word says which, as TERM-045 does for “self”. Sense 1, informational closure, is defined in full: I(X⃗_t; Z_{t+1} | Z⃗_t) = 0, which for a stationary discrete process is one condition with Barnett and Seth’s dynamical independence and with causal closure (THEORY-820), and is no mark of a system. Asked for at A11 of the exchange of 2026-10-20 (“That single disambiguation entry could save substantial rediscovery”), and at A12, A13 and A14, on the owner’s U11 and U13. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. It adopts no definition the record does not already hold. | Active |
| TERM-069 v2 | observational equivalence, under a probe family: two models, states or distributions agreeing on the outcome law of every probe in a declared admissible family; coarser than identity unless the family is rich enough, and, when probes are run one at a time, weaker on their marginals than on the joint law across them | ”Probe family” is in some two dozen argument entries (CLAIM-139, 142, 149, 190, 193, 206, 209, 215, 217, 223, 241, 264, 266, 269, 302 and 322; QUESTION-005, 031, 055, 067 and 135; CASE-041, 070 and 071) with no TERM. CLAIM-264 (Active, demonstrated) holds the mathematics. Asked for at A13 and A14 of the exchange of 2026-10-20. TERM-033, fidelity as observational equivalence over response trajectories, is its case with response trajectories as the probes, and TERM-014’s communicative object is a class of it. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. | Active |
| TERM-070 v2 | organizational closure, as closure of constraints: a set of constraints each of which depends directly on another in the set and has another depending on it (Montévil and Mossio 2015), distinct from informational closure and from a flame’s maintenance of the conditions of its own combustion | Montévil and Mossio’s definition (LIT-582, read in NOTE-468), as CLAIM-395 states it. CLAIM-395 (Active, demonstrated) is stated in it without a TERM to use, and THEORY-072’s demarcation of organisms and THEORY-071’s “autonomy” turn on it. Asked for at A10, A11, A12, A13 and A14 of the exchange of 2026-10-20, with A12’s condition: “The definition must explicitly distinguish the proved structural constraints from the still-Proposed claim that the definition demarcates organisms.” Sense 6 of TERM-068. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. | Active |
| TERM-071 v2 | persistence, of an organization, and which sense: state, dynamical, historical, viable and reinstatable | CLAIM-329 recorded three persistences from A9 of 2026-10-16. They return in the exchange of 2026-10-20 as A10’s five “continuities” (§10), A12’s “individuality, and which continuity”, and A13 and A14’s “organizational reconstitution”. A14’s merge condition: “the entries must preserve the distinctions between a stable state, a viable state, a self-maintaining organization, and a historically persisting individual.” This term lists the senses so that a claim using “persist” says which, as TERM-045 does for “self”. On the owner’s U13 (“definitions we’ve crystallized that are not currently in conflict”). Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. The exchange’s name “organizational reconstitution” is not adopted. | Active |
| TERM-072 v6 | perspective, and which sense: organizational, represented or phenomenal | The exchange on experience and interpretation used “perspective” in three senses and, by A11’s own account, slid between them. Organizational is a realized regime in which the availability, significance and efficacy of interpretations are mutually conditioned. Represented is a system’s model of its own standpoint. Phenomenal is a lived point of view. The constitutive thesis is that some organizational perspectives are phenomenal ones, so its claims must say which sense they use. Self-maintaining organizational perspective is a narrower subclass, not the definition. Adopted 2026-10-29, with character and lineage read as relations among realizations. | Active |
| TERM-073 v3 | interpretation, as a context-dependent determination of significance: a transformation that differentiates information and establishes or revises its consequences within an operative organization, defined without experience | The sense of “interpretation” in which CLAIM-412 is stated, from A7 and A11 of the exchange on experience and interpretation. An interpretation has three parts: a distinction, a context and a consequence. It is both the result and the operation, since applying it can change the state later interpretations act on, as TERM-026’s frame does. It is defined without experience, so unconscious perception, a classifier or a regulator interprets in this sense. That is the cost CLAIM-411 names. Adopted 2026-10-29, with significance kept apart from efficacy. | Active |
| TERM-074 v2 | organization, and which sense: relational arrangement, organizational maintenance, collective institution or organizational closure | ”Organization” does more unacknowledged work in this record than any other word, and the exchange of 2026-10-22 leaned on it in at least four senses: an arrangement of relations, the activity that maintains one, an institution, and closure of constraints. A proposal the owner relayed on 2026-10-22 asked for the senses to be listed, with the first as the default in “organizational perspective”. A claim using “organization” or “organized” should say which. | Active |
| TERM-075 v2 | attributed self, and which sense: held, imagined, imagined audience or appropriated | The record’s selves (TERM-045) are all held or given by the person, the presented self included. CLAIM-415 needs four further objects it had no names for: what others take a person to be and act on, what the person takes them to take them to be, who the person takes “them” to be, and the attribution taken up by the person as their own. They can come apart, and the claim depends on their doing so. Filed 2026-10-22 at the owner’s request, gathering two phrases from the exchange of that day (“socially operative identity” and “recursive social self-modeling”) that were first left unfiled. Adopted 2026-10-29. | Active |
| TERM-076 v2 | goal-conduciveness valence, organizational: a regime in which the negotiation among a system’s perspectives has, approximately, a potential, an ordering of the system’s own states by their bearing on its maintenance along which the moves that win its conflicts are improvements, persisting and restored after interruption; signed by whether the system runs ahead of or behind a reference course along that potential, and as intense as the negotiation’s decisions follow it rather than any rival ordering | The owner’s reframing of 2026-10-23: appraisal as the negotiation among competing perspectives, “common currency” as the negotiation admitting an (at least instantaneous) ordering, read in the ordinal sense (TERM-077), and hedonic valence as “a circumstance in which a particular kind of ordering dominates the dynamics”. Potential is read through Frijda’s three marks of control precedence (THEORY-055); the kind of ordering is one over the system’s own states by their bearing on its maintenance. Functional: it says nothing about whether the regime is felt. | Proposed |
| TERM-077 v2 | ordinal potential: of a negotiation over a finite set of options in a window of time, an ordering of the options that every move winning one of its conflicts climbs; it exists exactly when the wins never cycle, which is ordinal extendibility, that some complete ordering agrees with every win, and not observed comparability, since pairs never contested are not compared; and it is fixed only up to a class: every strictly increasing transform of one is one, and on a sparse record several orderings can be | The first level of the hierarchy the review of PR #327 proposed: ordinal coherence. Separated from the Hodge decomposition, which measures cardinal inconsistency and can reverse an ordinal comparison (CLAIM-434, part 4), and from a real-valued currency (CLAIM-436). | Active |
| TERM-078 v3 | persistent potential: an ordinal potential of a negotiation that is the same, up to its class, across successive windows of time, that decides the conflicts it bears on (priority), and towards which the dynamics climb again after a perturbation (resumption); exact when no move outside a perturbation descends it, and then a Lyapunov function of the one-move-at-a-time dynamics, and approximate when some do, and then no Lyapunov function, short of a drift condition that needs a cardinal potential and further assumptions | The second level of the hierarchy the review of PR #327 proposed, which the review called “dynamical ascendancy”. Named for the potential rather than reviving “ascendancy”, which the record retired the same day (TERM-076). It reads Frijda’s three marks of control precedence (THEORY-055) as properties of an ordinal potential over time. | Active |
| TERM-079 | belief, of a process: a maintained, truth-directed inferential commitment, held to the degree that the process uses a proposition as a premise in interpreting observations, generating expectations and evaluating counterfactuals across the contexts it bears on, together with the profile by which that commitment is revised; distinct from entertaining an interpretation, from asserting it, and from granting it authority over action | Proposed in the exchange of 2026-10-24 (workbench entry of 2026-10-24, U25), after the owner asked: “we have an operational characterization of feeling, wanting, liking… how about belief?” The record had accounts of what governs action and what is felt, and nothing comparable for belief. The candidate puts belief on the same footing, tested by its role in anticipation, inference and revision, not by report or by which motive wins. Not adopted. | Proposed |
| TERM-080 | collective intention, and which sense: participatory shared intention, institutionally constituted intention, or attributed collective intention | The owner’s, U12 of the exchange of 2026-10-26. A12’s sense map for an intention directed at a joint or group course of action, which several participants producing one outcome does not establish. The third sense is an observer’s attribution, not an instance of the first two. Rival criteria (Bratman, Gilbert, Tuomela, List and Pettit) are kept, not merged: the record holds all four, mostly unread. Used at once by the CECOT case, where two governments coordinated without one intention. Proposed. | Proposed |
| TERM-081 | moral worth, and which sense: intrinsic moral value, status-based dignity, or moral merit | The owner’s, U12 of the exchange of 2026-10-26. A12 would not let “moral worth” carry several meanings: the value a being has in itself, the respect owed to it by its status, and the praiseworthiness of its conduct. They come apart: blameworthy conduct does not lessen the respect owed, and an organization can produce valuable outcomes without a person’s standing. Standing itself is TERM-083. Proposed. | Proposed |
| TERM-082 v2 | consciousness, and which sense: phenomenal, access, self-consciousness or wakefulness | The owner’s, U12 of the exchange of 2026-10-26, quoting A11’s “None of these distinctions requires attributing consciousness, collective intention, or moral worth to the system”: “probably worth designing TERMs around these as well”. A12’s sense map, as a boundary: a claim about organization, access or self-modelling does not become a claim about experience by sharing a word with it. The senses are Block’s and the clinical one; the record reads Block in LIT-643. Proposed. | Proposed |
| TERM-083 v2 | moral standing: being owed moral consideration directly, for one’s own sake, and not only for one’s effects on others | The owner’s, U12 of the exchange of 2026-10-26. A12 split “moral worth” into this and a sense map (TERM-081). A claim of standing names its bearer, the interests or claims in question, the ground of standing and what follows. It does not entail consciousness as its only ground, collective agency, legal personhood or moral responsibility, and keeps moral patients apart from moral agents. Used at once by the Chagos case: the displaced are owed consideration whether or not they form one agent. Proposed. | Proposed |
| TERM-084 v3 | descent, and which sense: provenance, lineage, common ancestry or causal descent | ”Descent” carries at least four historical senses in the record’s claims, and they differ in what the claims turn on: whether the relation is directed, whether it carries a fidelity, and whether it implies continuation. CLAIM-210 and CASE-054 had let two of them meet, which the owner’s review of 2026-10-27 resolved; this term lists the senses so a claim says which. It does not cover descent in optimization (gradient or common descent directions). Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-27. | Active |
| TERM-085 v2 | correctability, of an institutional arrangement for a corrective objective: the chance that the arrangement, starting from the description of the problem it actually has, finds, authorizes, coordinates and carries out a plan achieving the objective before the deadline and within its resources | A10’s α_J, from the exchange of 2026-10-26, on the owner’s U10 tying the “correctability frontier” to “if I can’t find it, it isn’t there”. It is TERM-055’s operational availability with a corrective objective in place of a resource and an institutional arrangement in place of an agent: search, authorization, coordination and execution compete for the same time. Named because the exchange used the object in four turns (A7 to A10) under “remedial reach”, “effective remedial capacity”, “effective answerability” and “correctability frontier”. Adopted 2026-10-29. | Active |
| TERM-086 | organizational achievement, of a specified target: its attainment or maintenance, under declared conditions, where an identifiable arrangement of relations among components makes an explanatory difference that a comparison with admissible alternatives can show, as an episode, a maintained capacity or the reproduction of what sustains that capacity | The owner’s, U11 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “we should probably engineer a TERM for ‘organizational achievement’, and/or terms in that neighborhood.” A11 found the phrase already doing work for authenticity, corrective capacity and effective action, and gave it a target-relative, causally discriminating definition with three modes. An attribution, not a compliment: a coercive apparatus can have one. Proposed: adoption is the owner’s. | Proposed |
| TERM-087 v3 | cut, and which sense: a Cartesian cut, Pattee’s epistemic cut, or Barad’s agential cut, enacted by an apparatus | Three senses of “cut” the exchange of 2026-10-27 used, which A9 §4 said “are not interchangeable concepts”. The Cartesian cut is a separation of observer from observed taken as given before any measurement. Pattee’s epistemic cut (LIT-1190, read in NOTE-952) is the functional separation of symbolic description from the dynamics it measures or controls, and is epistemic, not ontological. Barad’s agential cut (read first-hand only in her 2012 essay, LIT-1869; LIT-1653 and LIT-1657 unavailable) is a differentiation enacted within a phenomenon by an apparatus, through which boundaries and properties become determinate. Proposed: the record had no word for them, and they recur in CLAIM-476. | Proposed |
| TERM-088 | individuation, and which sense: descriptive (an inquiry can distinguish and track it), dynamical (its organization persists under specified dynamics and perturbation, with robust identity and boundaries), constitutive (its relational organization helps fix its identity and boundary), and organizational autonomy, the further achievement of contributing to the maintenance of its own constitutive constraints | A18 of the exchange of 2026-10-27 named four claims about a candidate individual and said they “are neither four necessary stages nor four universally ranked degrees of existence. They are different claims requiring different evidence”. A23 §VI split them further. The owner’s second review insisted that individuation not be read as requiring endogenous maintenance: “A persistent externally sustained pattern may still be a dynamically individuated entity.” This term lists the senses so that a claim saying “individual” says which. Organizational autonomy is TERM-070’s closure, named here as the sense it is not. Proposed. | Proposed |
| TERM-089 v2 | apparatus, in the operational sense: a realized organization that selectively couples differences in one system to distinguishable outcomes in another; by function it may differentiate, retain, enforce and revise, and the four come apart | The sense of “apparatus” the exchange of 2026-10-27 converged on from U19 to U23, stated so that no observer and no constitutive metaphysics is presupposed. An apparatus makes some differences in a system produce distinct outcomes in another (differentiation), and may keep them (retention), let them change what happens next (enforcement), and change its own criteria of discrimination (revision). Proposed: the record uses “apparatus” in CLAIM-476 and TERM-087 in Barad’s sense, and needed a weaker one that a thermometer, a bacterium, a sensor network and luria all fall under without argument. | Active |
| TERM-090 v2 | effective boundary constraint, of a composite: the relation its interconnected parts impose on the variables an outside system can reach, once the interior is eliminated; approximately instantaneous or history-dependent, and, independently, possibly of a kind the parts’ relations could not state | What CLAIM-480 demonstrates and CLAIM-474, QUESTION-283 and CASE-179 use. A composite presents the systems that interact with its boundary with a relation among its accessible variables. Its examples are the series spring’s k₁k₂/(k₁ + k₂), Baez and Fong’s black box, a memory kernel, and Hansen and Ghrist’s three-way v₁ = v₂ + v₃. The term fixes three points: the relation is a constraint whether instantaneous or history-dependent; it is effective, not a new fundamental law; and it can exceed the parts’ relational vocabulary. Adopted 2026-10-29. | Active |
| TERM-091 v2 | relational vocabulary, of a class of descriptions: the arities and kinds of relation it can state (pairwise or higher-order, among states or among histories, of which declared types), and so which constraints are expressible in it at all | What QUESTION-283 asks about: whether composition can force a description to adopt relations its parts never needed. A sheaf on a graph has a pairwise vocabulary. Eliminating an interior can leave a constraint outside it (THEORY-1090). A luria record’s relational vocabulary is its declared relation types and fields, and amendments that add one (ADR-043, ADR-044) enlarge it. The term lets the record say that a constraint is inexpressible in a vocabulary, which is different from saying that it is false or unknown. Adopted 2026-10-29. | Active |
| TERM-092 v3 | inquiry frontier, of an agent at a budget: the questions it can formulate, making them determinate enough to pursue, with the concepts, records, tools, time and computation it actually has; distinct from the questions its language can express, from those it can pursue to a stated standard, and from those that have answers | The object of CLAIM-475, from A17 §§2 and 7 of the exchange of 2026-10-27. A question is on an agent’s frontier if some procedure available to it, within its budget and horizon, makes the question determinate enough to pursue. Formulating counts against the budget as well as answering. The frontier moves when resources grow and when reusable specifications make formulation cheaper, and it can change shape as well as size. The term separates askable from expressible and from answerable, which CLAIM-474’s last failure turns on. | Active |
| TERM-093 v3 | correspondence structure, and how it is held: the maps that say which local states or descriptions of interacting systems count as agreeing, distinct from the physical coupling between them, and held as formed, discovered or adapted | The object CLAIM-471, QUESTION-282, CLAIM-474 and CASE-179 all turn on. It is a family of comparison maps from local descriptions into shared spaces, whose joint kernel (the global sections) is what “compatible” and “glued” mean. It is not the coupling that moves the states. How a correspondence structure is held is one of three ways: formed by physical interconnection, discovered by measurement, or adapted by an apparatus. A claim using “gluing” should say which. Adopted at the thirteenth status review, once the formed sense was stated as the maps that wiring sets and not the joint behaviour they admit. | Active |
| TERM-094 | action readiness, with control precedence, in Frijda’s sense: a state of preparation for action, not a representation of a desirable state, that claims control over behaviour by persisting until an end state, resuming after interruption, capturing attention and taking priority over other actions | Filed by the status review of 2026-10-27 (ADR-057). THEORY-055 had eight dependents, the most of any Proposed THEORY after one, and most of them used only this concept: CLAIM-039 says THEORY-055 “supplies the Frijda characterization the claim depends on (a mode of action readiness), not evidence”. The concept is Frijda, Ridderinkhof and Rietveld’s (LIT-540, read in full in NOTE-433). It is separable from the contested part of THEORY-055, that an appraisal of concern pertinence elicits the emotion and that emotion categories differ by mode of readiness, which THEORY-057’s constructionism denies. A constructionist can use this term. Adopted on filing, because the record already relies on it in nine places and its definition is quoted from a source read in full. | Active |
| TERM-095 v2 | inquiry: a process that pursues a question, written (Σ, A, 𝓘, 𝓞, 𝓚, 𝓑): a language in which it is posed, an answer space that says which differences would count as an answer, the interventions and observations that make those differences accessible, criteria for judging candidate answers, and the resources it runs on; it is reflexive when any of these becomes what it is pursuing | The owner, 2026-10-27: inquiry is “an important building block of our formal argument”, and the record had no TERM for it. CLAIM-470 is stated in it, TERM-092’s inquiry frontier and TERM-088’s descriptive individuation presuppose it, and TERM-056’s question drift is a change inside one. The definition is A15 and A16’s tuple from the exchange of 2026-10-27, which neither called standard: answer space, admissible interventions, observations and criteria, with the language and the resource bounds A16 added. It is a construct, not a thesis. That inquiry is a form of specification is CLAIM-470’s claim, stated in this term and not built into it. Proposed. | Active |
| TERM-096 | group entity, as distinct from a category of members | A group entity is a collection taken as one bounded whole, by configural relations among its members, typically shared mental states; a category of members is a set whose members share a property and are, with respect to it, interchangeable. Membership in a category does not make someone part of a group entity, and the members of a group entity need not be alike. | Proposed |
| TERM-097 v2 | coherence, of a family of descriptions, transports or judgements: their agreement with one another under a stated correspondence structure (on overlaps, around cycles, between routes), distinct from fidelity to a source, from integration by dynamics, and from knowledge of the world | The sense in which the record keeps saying coherence is not something else: “coherence without integration” and “without knowledge” (CASE-179), a coherent record as the product of a legibility regime (CLAIM-448), and agreement between translation routes as coherence, not fidelity (CLAIM-496). It is a relation among the members of a family, read through the maps that say what counts as agreeing (TERM-093). Filed on the owner’s question of 2026-10-29 whether the record had TERMs for fidelity and coherence: fidelity has several, coherence none, though the word is in some 145 entries. Adopted the same day. | Active |
| TERM-098 v2 | concept, as realized by an organization: a reusable, systematically consequential pattern of distinctions, applicable across a stated range of contexts with inferential or operational consequences; distinct from the feature or representation that carries it, from the organization that realizes it, and from what it is about, and distinct from conceptual corrigibility, the further capacity to find and revise its inadequacies | Filed at the owner’s decision of 2026-10-31, after the exchange “Analyze nucleation concepts” defined “concept” three times in three turns (A4, A5, A6). At the owner’s review, version 2 separates conceptual organization, which the term names, from conceptual corrigibility, a further achievement it does not require. A candidate, not adopted: QUESTION-360 asks what would settle it. | Proposed |
| TERM-099 | self-formation, of an agent: the production, by the agent’s own activity on a discrepancy it cannot yet resolve, of a maintained capacity, a new distinction it can make legible or a new channel by which it can act, that outlasts the discrepancy and serves a class of later ones | At the owner’s review of 2026-11-03. “Self-formation” had appeared uncoded in CLAIM-022’s note of 2026-11-02, CLAIM-540, CLAIM-533, QUESTION-071’s notes and CLAIM-532, past the second-time rule. This term fixes the sense; CLAIM-532 is the thesis that it is what TERM-023’s transformation dimension produces, and CASE-191 a construction of it. It is the record’s sense, not Kane’s: Kane’s self-forming actions are undetermined choices that form the will, and this term says nothing about determinism. ADR-056’s proposed kinds would class it as a construct. | Proposed |
| TERM-100 | provenance, of a capacity or an organization, and which sense: formation provenance (whose process produced it), maintenance provenance (whose process keeps it), or source provenance (what it was made from, the sense the descent term holds) | At the owner’s review of 2026-11-03 (“there are probably one or more TERMs we could either connect to or add that would help make these groupings persistent”), after CASE-191 found that formation and maintenance provenance come apart, and that only the second can be read off a present organization. “Provenance” was already used in both senses, uncoded: CLAIM-522’s “maintenance provenance”, CASE-161, CASE-179’s arms. TERM-084 holds a third sense, a realization made from a source. This term separates them, says what can test each, and names the entries that turn on formation provenance, so that they can cite it. ADR-056’s proposed kinds would class it as a disambiguation. | Proposed |