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.
Social ontology — 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).
10 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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-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 |