Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Philosophy of language — meaning, content and reference as philosophy poses them — theories of meaning, meaning holism, assertion and whether machines assert, and conceptual change (group: philosophy).
32 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | 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 | Superseded — by TERM-013 |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 | Superseded — by TERM-042 |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-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 | Superseded — by TERM-035 |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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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 |