Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Agency — 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).
20 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | Superseded — by TERM-023 |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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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 |