Active — in force — the current answer, and what a citation should normally point at.
73 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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 |