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.
Metaphysics — what exists and what it is to exist — causation, emergence and levels, laws, time — as a philosophical question (group: philosophy).
88 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-029 v5 | A higher-order attitude cannot make a motive the agent’s own by its order alone: any attitude specified without presupposing the agent’s participation can itself be disowned, and any specified to include it presupposes what it was meant to explain | Velleman (1992), LIT-295: every candidate for the agent’s standpoint in a hierarchical account (second-order desire, Watsonian value, decisive commitment) is either disownable or question-begging. Buss & Westlund (LIT-296) state the regress as their own argument; McKenna & Coates (LIT-291) and Dryden (LIT-297) credit it to Watson 1975, which the record has not read. Frankfurt’s own 2004 lectures (LIT-293) never address it. The dilemma is argued by examples, not proved, and it does not show that higher-order structure is irrelevant to agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-032 | The Yoneda lemma determines an object only up to isomorphism, from its whole hom-functor, among objects the category already has; as a formal version of “an object is determined by its relations” it presupposes the relata | nLab, Yoneda lemma (rev. 2026-08-17), LIT-221 — y is fully faithful and y(c) ≅ y(d) iff c ≅ d, and pointwise bijections of hom-sets without naturality do not suffice. Lam & Wüthrich (LIT-222) state two of its consequences without the name. The philosophical reading, a relational criterion of identity up to isomorphism rather than a construction of objects from relations, is the record’s own. It does not say that the lemma supports eliminating objects. | Active |
| THEORY-034 v3 | Chakravartty’s dilemma reaches only structural realisms that keep relata but deny them every intrinsic identity-fixing feature, and of the seven structural-realist texts read here against it, two are of that kind: Floridi’s informational structural realism and Esfeld and Lam’s moderate structural realism | Chakravartty (2012), LIT-196 — non-eliminative OSR must choose eliminativism or a role for intrinsic features in identity, and the no-priority variant fares no better. The placements of the record’s other OSR texts on that map are the record’s own synthesis, from NOTE-192, NOTE-095, NOTE-099, NOTE-189 and NOTE-142. The account does not say the dilemma is sound, and it does not say eliminative OSR survives; the chapter itself leaves eliminative OSR untouched. Whether the founding texts are of the target kind is QUESTION-336. | Active |
| THEORY-036 v2 | Dennett’s real-pattern criterion, compressibility against the bit map, admits almost every non-random pattern; the projectibility, perspective and scale-relativity that rainforest realism needs are later additions that do the ontological work | Dennett (1991), LIT-220 — a pattern is real “if there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone can concoct it”. Ladyman (LIT-219) replaces this with indispensability to projectible generalisations, perspective- and scale-relative and lossy. Separating the two, and the claim that the added clauses carry the exclusions, is the record’s reading. The definition that would confirm it (ETMG) is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-038 | Category theory gives radical ontic structural realism no formal support: generalized elements exist in every category, morphisms relate objects the category presupposes, and Bain’s physical cases eliminate spacetime points, not relata | Lam & Wüthrich (2015), LIT-222, against Bain (2013), LIT-223. Bain’s “structure as object in a category” relabels relata rather than removing them, and his GR and TQFT cases dispose of points only. That the Yoneda lemma (LIT-221) strengthens the rebuttal is the record’s inference: no paper in the debate names it. This does not refute radical OSR. It removes one argument for it, and Eva 2016’s reply is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-040 v5 | A condition on free agency stated only in present psychological structure is met by a manipulated agent, so the account must count that agent free or add a historical condition, and no historical condition in the record’s readings is shown to escape | McKenna & Coates, LIT-291: every “mesh” compatibilism can be installed by a manipulator, and Frankfurt is quoted (2002, second-hand) accepting that a manipulated character leaves a person responsible. Dryden (LIT-297) and Buss & Westlund (LIT-296) make the same point against hierarchical autonomy. Historical supplements are reported to face “loading-in” and a circularity worry; neither is argued in full in the record. The claim says what the account must choose between, not which choice is wrong. | Proposed |
| THEORY-043 v6 | A mind of mindless agents and a mind of minded agents are one functionalist move run in two directions, and what separates them is an anti-nesting principle or an architectural criterion, neither yet principled | Minsky’s society of mind builds a mind downward, out of agents that are not minds. Schwitzgebel (LIT-159) builds a candidate mind upward, out of agents that are. The readings agree that agency survives both directions: Block grants a homunculi-head beliefs, List grants organised groups agency and awareness, Levin finds nested goal-pursuing collectives (his “Selves”) at every scale. The dispute narrows to phenomenal consciousness, and every published way to accept the downward move while refusing the upward one is either an anti-nesting principle (Putnam’s stipulation, IIT’s exclusion postulate, Kammerer’s functional version), each introduced for or justified weakly by the verdict it gives, or an architectural criterion that would count against a loosely coupled society of mind as much as against a nation. Proposed: an account of where a dispute stands, from philosophical argument and no measurement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-048 | In explaining psychiatric disorder, biological findings implement psychological functions rather than replacing them | Kendler (2008), LIT-539: following Marr, a lower-level theory either replaces a higher-level construct (temperature by mean kinetic energy) or implements it, and in psychiatry biology “will implement but not replace psychology”. The thesis is argued from neuroscience’s successes in perception, learning and memory, not from a psychiatric case, so it is Proposed. It is a thesis about explanation, not about distinct mental causes: it survives Pernu’s argument (LIT-147) that the neural evidence supports only mental causation by identity. Kendler 2005 (LIT-552), which argued the mind–brain propositions this paper develops, is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-058 v2 | Mental disorders are maintained by self-reinforcing causal loops rather than expressing a latent common cause, which is how they can outlast their triggers | Three traditions that do not cite one another for it put self-sustaining loops where a latent cause would be. Borsboom (LIT-547) makes disorder an alternative stable state of a strongly connected symptom network, kept up by hysteresis after its trigger has gone. Salkovskis, Sighvatsson and Sigurdsson (LIT-538) make it a threat meaning protected by the behaviour it drives. Kendler (LIT-539) finds causal loops across levels, from genes to culture. The convergence is real; the evidence is indirect, simulated or clinical, and none of it is an individual time series showing hysteresis, so the account is Proposed. It says nothing about what starts a disorder. | Proposed |
| THEORY-064 | What is experienced as a self is the content of a self-model the system cannot recognise as a model, and nothing beyond such models is a self | Metzinger’s précis of Being No One (2005), LIT-568, with his encyclopedia article “Self models” (LIT-450): a phenomenal self is a transparent self-model, one whose representational character “is not accessible to subjective experience”, so that the system experiences its content “simply as ourselves”. Selfhood is “a function realized by a lack of information”, and “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency is graded, and the perspective itself is modelled, as a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Two things are offered: a prediction (a wholly opaque self-model would abolish selfhood) and an ontological stipulation. The précis adds no evidence; its case studies are in the book, unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-065 | The unity that makes a movement an agent’s action is achieved by conformity to the constitutive norms of agency, not given by the causal unity of a mind, so collective agents are agents in the same sense as individual ones | Korsgaard (2014), LIT-587: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and ordinary attribution implies that the agent was active and that the action expresses who she is. Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action the form of self-determined efficacy; the content of the maxims chosen under that form constitutes practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes breaks the unity an animal is given, and reason is the work of rebuilding it, so unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, and people can act together “in the most literal sense”. The Tanner Lectures (LIT-564) supply the reflective structure the chapter assumes. Argued, with the Kantian premise assumed and the collective mechanism stated in a paragraph. | Proposed |
| THEORY-092 v3 | Behavioural capacity does not fix intelligence: a system with the capacity to respond sensibly to every possible input can lack it, so whether behaviour is intelligent, or the mark of any mental property, depends partly on how it is produced | Block (1981), LIT-642: the strongest behaviourist conception of intelligence, a capacity to give sensible responses to any sequence of inputs, “whatever they may be”, is met by a machine that stores every sensible conversation of a test’s length and looks up its next reply, yet “the machine has the intelligence of a toaster”. So psychologism is true: two systems alike in all actual and counterfactual behaviour can differ in intelligence through the processing that mediates it. Block (1995), LIT-630, n. 1: the same machine refutes the wider claim that there is no mental difference without a behavioural one. It is a claim about constitution, not evidence: performance stays evidence for competence. It names no required kind of processing, and its machine is a lookup table, not a trained network. | Proposed |
| THEORY-095 v3 | Phenomenal character is not fixed by long-arm functional role or by externally individuated representational content: on Inverted Earth it stays the same while both invert, so only internal accounts, short-arm functional or physical, remain open | Block (1990), LIT-634: on Inverted Earth colours and colour words are inverted, so a subject fitted with inverting lenses notices nothing. After long residence, or for a twin with a molecule-for-molecule identical brain raised there, the intentional content of the experience of the sky inverts and so does its long-arm functional role, while qualitative content stays the same; Q = F₁, Q = F₂ and F₁ ≠ F₂ breaks transitivity of identity. Block (2003), LIT-635, turns the case on externalist representationism: for colour there is no shared appearance property left to explain the sameness, and long-term memory blocks the gradual-shift reply, so “mental paint” is what stays the same. Proposed: both rest on an externalist shift of content and on first-person sameness, and Block concedes that a short-arm functional theory of qualia would escape. | Proposed |
| THEORY-119 v2 | An agent can be morally responsible for what she did although she could not have done otherwise, when what made the action unavoidable played no part in bringing it about, so the principle of alternate possibilities is false | Frankfurt (1969, LIT-694, read): Black stands ready to make Jones4 act as he wants and never needs to, so Jones4 could not have done otherwise and is as responsible, for blame or praise, as without Black. A fact that plays no part in bringing an action about cannot excuse it. The 1971 willing addict (LIT-692, read) is a second route. Robb’s SEP entry (LIT-294) gives the standard objections: the dilemma defence from the prior sign, flickers of freedom, general abilities, and the case’s oddity. None is settled, and the record has read the replies only in survey. | Proposed |
| THEORY-127 v4 | On the court agenda, and on any agenda in which every proposition reaches every other by conditional entailment and some minimally inconsistent triple stays consistent with two of its members negated, a group whose judgments are robustly rational under universal domain and respect unanimity cannot form its judgment on each proposition from its members’ judgments on that proposition alone unless one member dictates; its judgments must supervene on the members’ whole sets of judgments, and so can depart from what the members judge on the same proposition while being wholly fixed by them | List & Pettit (2006), LIT-705: under universal domain, robust group rationality (complete, consistent, deductively closed group judgments for every profile of rational member judgments) is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience (Propositions 1–3; the last two proved elsewhere and cited), and consistent with set-wise supervenience, which the premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures achieve (Propositions 4–5). Members’ judgments on a conclusion can then be insufficient, or even unnecessary, to fix the group’s judgment on it. List (2014), LIT-700, makes this the mark of a third kind of collective attitude: corporate attitudes, a group agent’s, supervene “holistically”, while aggregate and common attitudes supervene proposition by proposition. Active since 2026-10-19 for categorical judgments on the court agenda and on agendas with two stated connectedness conditions: the record re-derived Proposition 3 (and Proposition 2 as a corollary) itself. The extension to corporate attitudes in general is QUESTION-152. | Active |
| THEORY-133 v2 | In List and Menzies’s account of causes as difference-makers, a higher-level property that makes a difference to an effect is its cause, and its realizer is not, exactly when in some nearest situation without that realizer the property is realized differently and the effect still occurs; which holds depends on each causal system’s counterfactual structure, not on levels a priori | List & Menzies (2009), LIT-722. Take causes to be difference-makers. Then Kim’s exclusion principle fails, and a revised one holds or fails system by system. Given that a higher-level property makes a difference to an effect, its realizer is not a cause exactly when some nearest situation without the realizer has the property realized otherwise and the effect present; the record re-derived this. The claim that higher-level relations are typically insensitive to their realizers is an observation about scientific practice, and Pernu disputes the paper’s main example. Which systems meet the condition is QUESTION-213. | Active |
| THEORY-138 | X is a cause of Y exactly when some intervention on X with respect to Y would change Y, where an intervention is an exogenous causal process that alone sets X (M1), affects Y only through X (M2), is not caused by anything that affects Y by another route (M3), and leaves Y’s causes off the path through X unchanged (M4); so defined, causation is not reduced to non-causal facts but is not viciously circular, and needs no human agent | Woodward, “Causation and Manipulability” (SEP, 2001; revised 2023), LIT-713. A cause is what changes the effect under a surgical, exogenous intervention, defined relative to the effect by M1–M4. The account separates total from direct causes by combining interventions, and treats natural experiments as interventions. Active as the standard the record uses for what a causal claim asserts. This statement says nothing about invariance, proportionality or levels. | Active |
| THEORY-252 | On computational functionalism, an intervention that changes no neural activity and no actual causal interaction can change consciousness, because a clamp that stays idle on the actual input removes the transitions on every other input | Gidon, Aru and Larkum (2025), LIT-1000, read in full in NOTE-818: a voltage clamp replaying a recorded response injects no current on the matching stimulus yet fixes the network’s transitions on every other, so on the Turing–Putnam definition the computation degenerates while nothing that happens changes. It is a conditional about the view, not evidence about experience; the simulation shows only what an ideal clamp does, and the premise that removing unexercised branches changes experience is cited, not defended. | Proposed |
| THEORY-273 v2 | Inductive and explanatory usefulness is necessary but not sufficient for a natural kind: it holds of classes that share any natural property, and on its own it cannot tell a natural kind from a conventional or pragmatic one | Bird and Tobin, SEP “Natural Kinds” (2008; rev. 2022), LIT-244, read in full in NOTE-769: §1.1.1’s criteria, §1.2.1 on induction over properties and relations, and §3’s report of Lemeire (2018). The necessity half is common ground; the insufficiency rests on counterexamples and, for the step to conventional kinds, on a reported argument. It does not say what does suffice, and it does not deny that usefulness is evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-316 v2 | Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions on moral responsibility but leave standing the incompatibilist condition on an action’s causal history, which is the more fundamental one | Pereboom (2001), LIT-1006, Chapter 1 pp. 1–6 and the Introduction (pp. xv), read in NOTE-823, Skimmed. Fischer concedes that a Frankfurt-style case does not refute a requirement that the action not be deterministically produced by factors beyond the agent’s control, and Pereboom builds causal-history incompatibilism on that concession. It does not say that determinism rules out responsibility; that is argued in Chapter 4, which was not read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-328 | An agent manipulated so that he meets every leading compatibilist condition is not morally responsible in the basic-desert sense, no responsibility-relevant difference separates him from an ordinarily determined agent, and so causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control best explains why neither is responsible | Pereboom’s four-case argument, as two surveys report it: Caruso’s SEP entry (LIT-1047, NOTE-862), which quotes Case 2, and De Marco and Cyr (LIT-1045, NOTE-856), which quote Case 1 and state the best-explanation conclusion. Pereboom’s book (LIT-1006) is a source for the thesis it states in its Introduction and Chapter 1, not for the cases, which are in the unread Chapter 4. It does not say that determinism is true, or that manipulation itself is what defeats responsibility. The argument says it is the determination by outside factors, and that the manipulator is irrelevant. | Proposed |
| THEORY-415 | Nothing has all four marks that qualia are said to have, being ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible, because neither the subject nor an outside tester can tell a change in a quale from a change in the subject’s reactions to it; what is real in their place is the practical ineffability and idiosyncrasy of information-rich property detection | Dennett (1988), LIT-433, read in full in NOTE-357. Argued by fifteen intuition pumps, not by proof, and the author says so. The central step rests on a stipulation that two surgeries, or two adaptation stories, produce identical introspective effects. NOTE-357 filed no THEORY because the record does not hold the replies (Shoemaker 1981, Block 1980); this account states the claim as the reading supports it and leaves it Proposed for that reason. Its “there simply are no qualia at all” is a tactical choice of words by the author’s endnote 2. | Proposed |
| THEORY-417 | ’Personal identity’ names several largely independent questions, among them who one is (characterization), what a person is, what it takes for one to persist, how many of us there are and what matters in survival; the persistence question concerns numerical identity, which ‘remaining the same person’ in the characterization sense presupposes, and posing it as ‘a person at one time and a person at another’ assumes that we are persons essentially | Olson (2002; rev. 2023), LIT-454, read in NOTE-374. Seven questions: characterization, personhood, persistence, evidence, population, personal ontology and what matters. The distinctions are conceptual and the record holds them as stated. They do not say which answer to any of the questions is right; the entry’s own answer, animalism, is argued in other sections and is not part of this account. The self is set aside by the entry, so the map does not cover the self literature. | Active |
| THEORY-436 | Pain is a functional state of a whole organism, possessing a certain functional organisation as a probabilistic automaton, rather than a brain state, and this is the more plausible empirical hypothesis because one pain predicate applies to physically different organisms; the hypothesis keeps swarms out only by a stipulated condition that no pain-feeler has parts that separately possess the organisation | Putnam (1967), LIT-396, recorded as Skimmed in NOTE-335 from a course excerpt of the 1975 reprint, which carries the four-clause hypothesis verbatim; the original is Unavailable here. Proposed, and resting on that excerpt and on a result discussed throughout the literature the record holds. Clause (1) is empty by Putnam’s own admission, since everything is a probabilistic automaton under some description, and clause (3), the anti-nesting condition, is introduced with one motive, to rule out swarms of bees. The argument against the brain-state view is comparative plausibility, not evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-441 | In spatially compact vacuum general relativity the Hamiltonian vanishes, so time is represented by no flow on a symplectic space and change by no functions on a space of states; this problem of time does not come from the 3+1 split, is absent from asymptotically flat general relativity, and does not show change to be illusory | Belot (2007), LIT-122, read in NOTE-118. A formal, not rigorous, derivation in the covariant phase-space formalism, with standard results cited. The vanishing Hamiltonian and the covariant derivation are strong; the canonical isomorphism of the reduced spaces is “presumed”; the claim that an artificially covariant theory escapes is hedged (“I think”). It is classical only. It diagnoses the problem and does not solve it. | Active |
| THEORY-447 v2 | Granted that a person survives a brain transplant and that half a brain would do, each product of a division stands in all that matters in ordinary survival, so what matters is not identity, which is one-one and all-or-nothing, but psychological relations that can branch and come in degrees | Parfit (1971), LIT-447, read in NOTE-378, with the fission dilemma as Olson’s survey states it, LIT-454 (NOTE-374). The division argument is strong given its premises, and the premises are stated: brain-transplant survival is assumed, not argued. It does not say that connectedness matters more than continuity, which Parfit asserts for lack of space, or that a copy or a transcript is a survivor: the dependence q-memory needs is left “(whatever that is)”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-448 | On a substance ontology, a gestated foster that is part of the pregnant organism either is no substance, so that mammals begin at birth and the foster is not the later baby, or is part and substance at once, which leaves no consistent count; a process ontology keeps both parthood and foster–neonate identity, at the price of a count between one and two that it does not define | Meincke (2021), LIT-142, read in NOTE-115. The critique of the Parthood View under substance ontology holds on its own and is the paper’s firm contribution. The positive view rests on five process-biology premises assumed for the sake of argument, and is programmatic by the paper’s own word; “something in between one and two” has no formal content. It keeps parthood rather than rejecting it, and it draws no ethical conclusion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-452 | A thing with many equally good candidate boundaries can be counted as one in two ways that cover each other’s failures: supervaluation makes ‘there is one cat’ true on every precisification though no candidate is definitely the cat, and counting by almost-identity, meaning extensive mereological overlap, makes it true enough where the candidates overlap almost completely | Lewis (1993), LIT-1015, read in full in NOTE-722. Two answers to Unger’s problem of the many, offered together. Supervaluation makes “there is one cat” super-true at the granted cost that nothing is super-truly the cat. Almost-identity, which is overlap and not similarity, makes the many candidates “almost one”. It is not transitive and its threshold is left undecided. Each covers a case the other fails: Fred’s house needs supervaluation, and supervaluation is natural only where the candidates differ little. It assumes semantic indecision, perdurance and no natural joint among the candidates. It has no metric, no dynamics and no threshold, so it is a precedent for counting by something weaker than identity, not evidence for any of the record’s claims. | Proposed |
| THEORY-453 | Basic physical objects can be nothing beyond the bearers of their relations: relations give them identity conditions wherever they discern them, and where nothing discerns them, as with entangled systems of one kind or points of a symmetric space-time, a primitive numerical diversity that is not a thisness suffices; general relativity’s tensor and fibre-bundle formulations fit this reading but do not require it | Esfeld & Lam (2008), LIT-895, read in full in NOTE-695. Moderate structural realism: relations require relata, but relata need no fundamental intrinsic properties, and objects and relations depend on each other with no priority. Its distinctive move is primitive numerical diversity, which it says gives no identity of any sort. The GR sections show interpretive fit, not entailment. Identity is equivocal between §1, where symmetric space-times need primitive diversity, and §2, where the metric “completely determines” structural identity; the one concrete construction cited works only without symmetries and breaks the general covariance the view rests on. The no-priority argument assumes three options are exhaustive. | Proposed |
| THEORY-471 | Psychological states are not the machine-table states of an organism’s unique best description as a probabilistic automaton, because some are never occurrent, several hold at once, there are indefinitely many and they contain one another, none of which a machine-table state can be; this leaves open that they are computational states of such a system | Block & Fodor (1972), LIT-641, read in NOTE-491. Five independent arguments against the machine-state identity theory, each with a stated escape that keeps functionalism: dispositions with no occurrent state, simultaneous states, too-fine individuation, productivity and constituent structure. They refute the machine-table clause, not functionalism. The paper’s remaining argument (its third), inverted or absent qualia, is the only one aimed at functionalism broadly, and it is explicitly prima facie. | Active |
| THEORY-476 | If continuant persons are maximal aggregates of person-stages interrelated by the psychological relation R, then the relation of belonging to one person is R itself, so Parfit’s premises do not show that identity is not what matters; the price is that persons overlap in fission and are counted by a relation weaker than identity | Lewis (1976), LIT-446, read in NOTE-373. Shown: that identity being one-one and all-or-nothing, and what matters branching and coming in degrees, do not entail that identity is not what matters, once stages and continuants are told apart; and that under supervaluation degrees of I-relatedness equal degrees of R-relatedness. Stipulated: that persons are the maximal R-interrelated aggregates. Conceded as costly: counting persons by tensed identity, which “is not a kind of identity”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-485 | Wave-function realism falsifies causal closure restricted to spacetime but is compatible with closure relative to fundamental physics, so quantum ontology opens no causal gap for non-physical causes; what it forces on the physicalist is a criterion of the physical and a bridge from dynamical to causal completeness | Poltorak (2026), LIT-164, an unrefereed preprint read in full in NOTE-112. “Every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause” has two tacit parameters, a domain and a completeness relation. With the domain set to spacetime the principle fails under wave-function realism; with it set to the ontology of a complete fundamental theory it survives. The move to a breach needs a premise that wave-function realists deny. The conclusions are modest and close to analytic once the terms are defined. The target is conceded to be a picture, not a published argument, and the dynamical-to-causal bridge is asserted, not argued. | Proposed |
| THEORY-487 | Social ontology asks two separable questions about a social category: what grounds a fact of that kind, the conditions something must meet, and what anchors those conditions, the facts that put them in place; theories of the field, such as convention, collective acceptance and practice, answer the second, and a theory can be individualist about one and not the other | Epstein (2018; rev. 2024), the SEP entry Social Ontology, LIT-487, read in NOTE-393 with the author’s précis of The Ant Trap (LIT-478, otherwise unread). A survey organised by its author’s own distinction, likened to semantics and metasemantics. It rests on a survey that reports the dissents (Hawley, Schaffer, Haslanger) in a sentence each and argues the distinction by example. Whether anchoring is a relation distinct from grounding is reported as the author’s view and as disputed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-506 | Every well-developed theory of how mind fits into the cosmos is bizarre, contrary to what most people confidently believe, and none is epistemically compelling, because common sense about the metaphysics of mind is incoherent; so no coarse position, materialism included, deserves credence much above 50% | Schwitzgebel (2024), LIT-216, read in full from the June 2022 final manuscript in NOTE-188; the published body text was not reached. Chapter 3’s Universal Bizarreness and Universal Dubiety, with the other chapters as case studies. Bizarreness is an abductive generalization over the theories actually developed, with a standing challenge to find a counterexample, not a result about all possible theories. Dubiety rests on expert disagreement, the lack of any method and cosmological uncertainty, and the 50% figure is the author’s judgment. The author’s own credences lean materialist, at about 55%. | Proposed |
| THEORY-507 | Any system with the same fine-grained functional organisation as a conscious system has qualitatively the same experiences, with natural though not metaphysical necessity, because otherwise a neuron-by-neuron replacement would yield either a rational subject systematically wrong about its fading experience or experience that flips with a switch nobody could notice; the principle covers only isomorphs, so it says nothing about systems merely similar in kind to a conscious one | Chalmers (1995), LIT-392, read in full in NOTE-347, with the one-page sketch in “Facing Up”, LIT-406 (NOTE-336). A plausibility argument by the author’s own account: the fading- and dancing-qualia conditionals are strong given the replacement series; their rejection rests on a premise about self-knowledge drawn from familiar cases. It extends to a population of people implementing a person’s neurons, so it rules out absolute anti-nesting for isomorphs. It does not reach any system that is not an isomorph of something conscious, which includes every actual AI system and every group. | Proposed |
| THEORY-531 v2 | Told in the third person, a transfer of memories and character between two bodies reads as the persons exchanging bodies; told in the first person, no predicted psychological change removes the subject’s reason to fear pain to his own body, and the step that completes the exchange happens only to the other man, so the two tellings support opposite criteria | Williams (1970), LIT-462, read in NOTE-387. The strongest step is shown given its premise: the last step of the series that turns amnesia into a body exchange changes nothing for the subject. The premise, that psychological change cannot remove the reason to fear pain, is argued from cases. Williams claims no criterion of identity, calls his resolution “rather shaky” and “risky”, and does not treat fission. | Proposed |
| THEORY-535 | Quantum systems read as bundles of property-instances with no principle of individuality can have their kinds and their number stated in quasi-set theory, so that N indistinguishable particles get a definite quasi-cardinal without labels; the construction covers kinds and counting only, not states, actualization or dynamics | Holik, Jorge, Krause & Lombardi (2021), LIT-107, read in full from the preprint in NOTE-127. The Lombardi–da Costa ontology of properties makes a quantum system a bundle of instances of universal type-properties, with no principle of individuality. Krause’s quasi-set theory Q, reinterpreted over property-instances, represents an atomic bundle as a qset taking one instance from each qset of indiscernibles, guaranteed by Q’s Axiom of Choice, and N particles as a subqset of quasi-cardinal N. The new formal content is about two pages (§6), the printed proofs contain errors, and states, actualization and dynamics are not formalized. The claims about Kochen–Specker and non-separability are recharacterizations by definition, not results. | Proposed |
| THEORY-538 | A system believes and desires when its behaviour is reliably and voluminously predictable by treating it as a rational agent with the beliefs and desires it ought to have, and the success of that strategy is an objective fact though adopting it is free; the more richly a system is connected to its world, the fewer interpretations fit, so thermostat and person differ in degree | Dennett, “True Believers”, LIT-398, read in NOTE-353 in the revised text of 1987/1997. The criterion is substrate-neutral and silent on experience. Its adverbs are not quantified, the lectern is excluded only by gain over a baseline the essay leaves informal, and the Martian argument is an intuition pump that assumes the intentional patterns are not captured physically. “Most beliefs are true” rests on a way of counting beliefs Dennett doubts exists. Proposed, and a rival of both Block’s psychologism and Searle’s causal-powers account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-540 | For moral purposes the body is bounded below by depth: objects whose real definitions are too microphysically committal are not body parts though they are parts in the ordinary sense, and bodily rights and interests concern only events that change the body’s high-level properties, so a brain-computer interface user’s implemented software can be a body part while the third-party server running it is not | Register (2025), LIT-138, read in full in NOTE-151. An argument from cases. It assumes that BCIs can be body parts and that no part of a person may be owned by another, and uses depth to reconcile the user’s unqualified bodily ownership with the operator’s property in the server. The two moral principles are its operative premises, and it says they do not depend on the real-definition ontology, which only explains them. The threshold for “high-level” is context-sensitive and unfixed, and the step that software and server are distinct coinciding objects is hedged. The conflict over servers is narrowed, not dissolved. | Proposed |
| THEORY-546 v2 | A person persists by psychological continuity, not by sameness of substance or of the human animal; Locke’s sameness of consciousness, which he leaves undefined, meets the charges of circularity, intransitivity and gaps when recast as overlapping chains of causally dependent psychological states with quasi-memory, and fission then needs either a clause against branching or multiple occupancy | Locke (1694), LIT-464, read in NOTE-385, with the repairs as Olson’s survey (LIT-454, NOTE-374) and Parfit (LIT-447, NOTE-378) give them. Locke shows that same man, same substance and same person can be given different conditions; that the person’s are those of consciousness he asserts and illustrates. The repaired criterion is the majority view in the survey, and its author, an animalist, argues it implies two thinkers in every chair. It is a criterion of persistence, not an account of what matters or of what we are made of. | Proposed |
| THEORY-556 | Clustering, abstraction and generative modelling can be how we come to identify natural kinds, essential properties and unrealized possibilities, but kinds, essences and possibilities are not by definition what such algorithms would find under ideal conditions, because nothing guarantees they are effectively computable; so an algorithm’s output is evidence about a kind, neither objective nor vacuous, and not what makes it one | Watson (2023), LIT-187, read in full in NOTE-172. Three pairs of theses, one per task: the epistemic one (EC, EA, EG) accepted, the ontological one (OC, OA, OG) rejected, each on the same computability ground. The rejection is a bare possibility argument with no example of an uncomputable kind, and the acceptance is hedged (“or something very much like them”) so far that it is hard to falsify. The pragmatic, context-relative view of kinds is asserted, not defended. Self-supervised learning and foundation models are outside its scope. | Proposed |
| THEORY-563 v2 | Consciousness is a real pattern in the brain’s content-bearing states, a description that trades predictive accuracy for compression, and so coarse that describing the brain through it is metaphor; on that reading there is no Cartesian theatre, whether a given content was conscious can lack an answer when two descriptions compress and predict equally, and first-person reports are fallible as literal descriptions of the brain but authoritative as an author’s | Taylor (2024), LIT-461, read in full in NOTE-379. An interpretation of Dennett offered as consistent, explicitly not as correct or as what Dennett meant. Its argument for indeterminacy in masking rests on Dennett’s idealised description of the cases, which Taylor calls “somewhat simplistic”. It does not say which real pattern consciousness is, or what makes a real pattern a conscious one rather than a belief pattern. Filed as the account the reading states, at the strength the reading gives it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-575 | ’Social group’ names two kinds of thing: organized social groups, such as teams, courts and families, are structured wholes whose people occupy the nodes of an internal social structure, while feature social groups, such as women, racial groups and classes, are social kinds, nodes in external social structures, and are not concrete wholes | Ritchie (2020, online 2018), LIT-486, read in NOTE-389, building on her 2013 view (LIT-479). A social structure is one constitutively, not merely causally, dependent on social factors. Organized groups realize internal structures; feature groups are positions in external ones, which can be intersectional. A framework offered to “motivate”, in the author’s word: accounts of gender are shown to fit it, not argued for against rivals, and the work of excluding arbitrary collections is done by a restriction the framework imports. Silent on agency; the record uses it to say which groups the agency questions are about. | Proposed |
| THEORY-579 v2 | If belief is individuated by functional role, an external store that is constantly consulted, directly available and automatically endorsed can carry a standing belief, so the material vehicles of some mental states extend beyond the skin; the step from coupling to parthood rests on that premise and a parity principle the authors state rather than argue | Clark & Chalmers (1998), LIT-097, read in NOTE-180, with Clark’s reply to the critics (2005), LIT-403, read in NOTE-363. Otto’s notebook plays for him the role Inga’s memory plays for her, so on role-functionalism it carries his standing belief, and Twin Otto, a duplicate from the skin in, believes otherwise. The constitutive step is carried by role-functionalism, the parity sentence and explanatory simplicity, none of them defended; the four coupling features mark a clear case and are explicitly not necessary and sufficient. Proposed: the step from causal coupling to parthood is the open point. The thesis is about vehicles of standing beliefs, not about consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-589 | No principle of mereology is merely a fixing of what ‘part’ means: even reflexivity, transitivity and antisymmetry face counterexamples that do not rest on equivocation, and every principle beyond them is contested, so classical mereology is one substantive theory among several and not a neutral default | Varzi, SEP “Mereology”, LIT-124, read in full in NOTE-163. The entry’s verdict, reached by surveying counterexample families: Antisymmetry “can hardly be regarded as constitutive”, and most ordinary-language objections to Reflexivity and Transitivity equivocate, leaving the metaphysical ones. It is the author’s informal argument, and he is a known extensionalist who gives that side the last word on extensionality. Its headline that “all composition principles turn out to be controversial” is stronger than its own verdict that bounds for overlapping things are “rather uncontroversial”. It corrects the record’s earlier summary, which called the partial-order core uncontroversial. | Proposed |
| THEORY-594 | Unitarily inequivalent representations in quantum field theory need not refute ontic structural realism: what does physical work in spontaneous symmetry breaking and in the DHR derivation of quantum statistics is structure across representations, so a structural realist who takes structure to be modal and to span them can accept that work, though the modal conception is undeveloped and the removal of Howard’s premise rests on Baker’s sufficient condition for intertranslatability | French (2010 draft; SHPMP 2012), LIT-170, read in NOTE-162 from the unpaginated preprint. Every technical step is imported (Wallace, Earman, Ruetsche, Halvorson & Müger, Baker); the paper’s contribution is interpretive and informal. The DHR result that statistics and charge kinds follow from the algebra is strong physics; that it favours OSR is French’s reading. The modal “trans-world” structure is proposed, not developed, and the combined third option “obviously requires further elaboration”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-609 | When implementing an automaton requires reliable, counterfactual-supporting transitions for every formal state, Putnam’s construction fails, but any system with a clock and a dial still implements every inputless finite-state automaton, and any system with the right input–output dependencies, an input memory and a dial implements every finite-state automaton with those dependencies, so finite-state automata cannot carry computational sufficiency; combinatorial-state automata are argued, not proved, to escape | Chalmers (1996), LIT-404, read in NOTE-342 from the author’s HTML copy. The failure of Putnam’s construction and the clock-and-dial and input-memory theorems are constructive proofs given the definitions, so FSA-functionalism “still almost reduces to behaviorism”. That a combinatorial-state automaton can be implemented only by the right fine-grained causal structure is a sketch: the obvious blind construction grows by a factor of n per step, and that every construction does is asserted. Logically possible false implementations and the one-region-per-component condition are left open by the author. | Active |
| THEORY-610 | What survives radical theory change in a mature science, and so what its predictive success warrants belief in, is mathematical structure, equations carried over intact or recovered as limiting cases, and not the ontology that interpreted them, as Fresnel’s reflection and refraction equations survive into Maxwell’s theory while the elastic-solid ether does not | Worrall (1989), LIT-315, read in NOTE-297. Epistemic structural realism, credited to Poincaré, offered as the one position that keeps both the no-miracles argument and the pessimistic induction. The support is one worked case, which Worrall himself calls unrepresentative because the equations survive intact, and an appeal to the correspondence principle with one further example. “Structure” and “structural approximation” are undefined. The view is agnostic about what there is; the ontic turn, Ramsey sentences and the Newman objection belong to later work. | Proposed |
| THEORY-612 | Natural selection cannot be both a cause and an effect of a process such as niche construction: if selection is an emergent population-level process, niche construction partly composes it, and a whole and its parts are not independently fixable and so not causally related; if selection is not emergent, it is either no cause at all or incoherently individual-level. Niche construction can still cause the product of selection | Hazelwood (2023), LIT-156, read in full in NOTE-137. A dilemma against strong reciprocal causation in the extended evolutionary synthesis, aimed at Laland and colleagues. Emergence is Wilson’s synchronic dependence plus autonomy, cashed out as composition; causation is Woodward’s interventionism with independent fixability. Its force rests on a process/product split for selection and a compositional reading of realization, both defended by citation and flagged as contestable, and its second horn considers only two non-emergent options. The weak sense, that organisms and environments affect each other, is granted as unobjectionable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-621 | Indexing each quantum fact to the system it is a fact for, and computing probabilities only between facts relative to the same system, removes the contradiction between the collapse and unitary probability rules in Wigner’s-friend cases; the price is that values are not held at all times or by all systems alike, there is no global view, and no quantum state of the universe | Rovelli (2021), LIT-177, read in full in NOTE-174. For a fact a and exclusive facts bᵢ, the collapse rule Σᵢ|W(c,bᵢ)|²|W(bᵢ,a)|² and the unitary rule |Σᵢ W(c,bᵢ)W(bᵢ,a)|² differ by interference; RQM applies the first only when the bᵢ and c are relative to the same system. Decoherence makes some relative facts stable. The core rule is postulated, not derived, and inter-observer consistency gets one sentence. The chapter is expository, and several of its headline claims outrun its support. | Proposed |
| THEORY-622 | Spatial boundaries are bona fide where a spatial discontinuity or a heterogeneity of material is present and fiat where they exist only by demarcation; the two obey different topologies, distinct bodies are never in bona fide contact, so any whole of separate bodies is a fiat object, and real properties of the material still enable and constrain where fiat boundaries can be drawn | Smith & Varzi (2000), LIT-1024, read in full in NOTE-721. A typology with a formal sketch: ordinary closure topology for bona fide boundaries, and a Brentanian theory of coinciding boundaries for fiat ones, which are parts of what they bound. The test is whether a discontinuity is there, not who or what made it. The theory is spatial, synchronic and pitched at the common-sense level; it has no models or consistency result, and the typology is stipulated by examples. It does not map onto the record’s produced/imposed distinction, and it classifies the record’s combined forms as fiat without choosing among them. | Proposed |
| THEORY-625 v2 | Institutional facts are status functions, imposed by collective acceptance on things that cannot perform the function by their physical structure alone; the status carries deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action, and it exists only as represented, so institutions require language; ‘X counts as Y in C’ is the common case of the more general ‘We accept (S has power (S does A))‘ | Searle (2006), LIT-482, read in NOTE-388 in its Papers printing, the record’s readable statement of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485, unread). Conceptual analysis, not argument: the three primitives are asserted to suffice, collective intentionality is referred to an unread 1990 paper, and the animal line is hedged. The paper revises the book: some Y terms have no X, and the general form is “We accept (S has power (S does A))”. Hindriks & Guala’s rules-in-equilibrium account is its rival on what a constitutive rule adds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-630 | A protective measurement yields the expectation value ⟨A⟩ on a single system in the ideal limit, and with enough observables ψ up to a global phase; this shows ψ to be ontic only if the protection procedure carries no information about ψ, a premise that Zeno and adiabatic protection, which select ψ from a discrete eigenbasis the experimenter chose, do not meet | Gao (2016), LIT-121, read in full in NOTE-140. Under Zeno protection the pointer shifts by exactly ⟨A⟩ with no entanglement (eqs. 1.9–1.13), and projectors on regions plus a current operator give ρ and j (eqs. 1.14–1.16). Gao argues three routes from this to ψ-ontology, claimed to need no preparation independence. All three rest on the premise that the protection does not “know” ψ, which Gao’s own fn. 10 partly concedes is false. The random-discontinuous-motion ontology and the collapse model built on it are further, weaker steps. | Proposed |
| THEORY-631 | Standard unitary quantum theory and the general quantum theory of open systems are intertranslatable on their common domain, so neither dependence nor justification ranks them; the open theory comes out more fundamental only through premises about interpretation, that orthodox and Everettian readings exhaust the complete readings of the state vector, and that density operators precede state vectors in how states are assigned | Cuffaro & Hartmann (2021), LIT-037, read in full in NOTE-077. Stinespring dilation one way and dropping Lindblad terms the other make the two frameworks a tie on ontic dependence (OntFund-1) and on justification (EpFund-1). The verdict for the open theory comes from OntFund-2, which holds only if orthodox and Everettian readings are all that count, and from EpFund-2, which rests on imperfect preparation. Explanatory fundamentality is effectively abandoned. The paper proves nothing formal, and its “tout court” conclusion outruns §4. | Proposed |
| THEORY-633 | Experiences have no phenomenal properties: introspection represents physical, quasi-phenomenal properties of sensory states as phenomenal, so what needs explaining is why experiences seem to have phenomenal properties, not how a brain produces them; a weaker view that keeps a deflated phenomenal residue is unstable unless it can say what that residue is | Frankish (2016), LIT-458, read in NOTE-384, names the view and the “illusion problem”; Dennett’s reply to Chalmers (1996), LIT-397 (NOTE-346), gives its earlier form, that subtracting every function from one’s consciousness leaves only a conviction; Frankish (2025), LIT-103 (NOTE-143), applies it to valence. A research programme, not a theory: Frankish proposes no mechanism, the instability of weak illusionism is argued by challenge, the case is abductive, and Dennett’s subtraction is an introspective assertion. It keeps consciousness in an inclusive, functional sense and denies only phenomenal properties. | Proposed |
| THEORY-635 | If the quantum state of a Bohmian system is identified with the velocity dispositions it induces on the particles, inequivalent states can share one dispositional history: every energy eigenstate of a free particle in a box induces zero velocity everywhere, so the reading erases differences of energy and of typicality unless the map from states to velocity fields is injective for generic solutions, which is conjectured, not proved | Belot (2011), LIT-100, read in full in NOTE-110. Under the guidance law ψ(t) gives a vector field X_t on configuration space, read as a holistic disposition. For a particle in [0,1], each φn(x) = sin(πnx) gives zero velocity everywhere, so infinitely many energy eigenstates share one dispositional history, and the distinction between φ1 and φ2 in energy and typicality is lost. The rescue rests on Goldstein’s unproved genericity conjecture (fn. 41), and the problem arises only for closed systems (fn. 42). It is a counterexample to one reading, not a verdict on ψ’s category. | Active |
| THEORY-638 | Instantiating a formal program is never by itself sufficient for understanding or intentionality, since a person can carry out a program for answering questions in Chinese by hand without understanding Chinese; whatever thinks does so in virtue of causal powers at least equivalent to the brain’s, and the reply that the whole system understands is answered only by an asserted internalisation | Searle (1980), LIT-400, read in NOTE-349 (target article only). The room is a full implementation run by a person, and his first-person verdict is read as the system’s. The decisive step against the systems reply (“the system is just a part of him”) is asserted, not shown, and which causal powers matter is left empirical. The argument is about understanding and intentionality, not consciousness, and it grants that machines, including artifacts with the brain’s causal powers, could think. Proposed; Dennett’s intentional strategy is its rival. | Proposed |
| THEORY-644 | Panpsychism escapes dualism’s problem of mental causation only in its constitutive Russellian form, where micro-experiences constitute macro-experience; that form meets three combination problems, of subjects, qualities and structure, and every response that avoids combining (emergent, autonomous or identity panpsychism) gives back the advantage in mental causation or revised physics, while the combinatorial responses remain unworked | Chalmers (2016/2017), LIT-395, read in full in NOTE-358 from the April 2015 draft. A map of the problem, not a solution or an impossibility proof, and the author says so. The dilemma is argued case by case; the strongest arguments against constitutive panpsychism, subject-summing and structural mismatch, rest on conceivability premises and on a structure-preservation principle called plausible, not shown. The verdicts on which responses are most promising are judgements of promise. | Proposed |
| THEORY-646 | Skepticism about inner mental representations does not motivate fictionalism about folk psychology, because realism about beliefs as internal, intentional, causal states does not require the representational theory of mind; and a fictionalist who lets pretence yield genuine assertions about the overall state that causes behaviour is committed to that state | Drayson (2025), LIT-112, read in NOTE-117, against Toon’s Mind As Metaphor (2023). Toon’s negative argument needs “committed to internal, intentional, causal attitudes ⇒ committed to RTM”, which non-representational functionalism (Lewis, Putnam, Loar) makes false; and his metasemantic case against inner representation mistakes one motivation for RTM for part of it. His positive argument faces a dilemma: a merely behavioural overall state gives fictionalism no causal advantage, and a causal one is a reason to identify it with the belief. It argues against two motivations, assumes fictionalism coherent, and sketches the functionalist alternative by citation in one paragraph. | Proposed |
| THEORY-650 | Whether a self at one time is the same as a self at another has an answer only relative to a level of abstraction fixed by the purpose of asking, and asked at no such level it has none; the question with a substantive answer is what makes a self one thing at a time | Floridi (2011), LIT-136, read in NOTE-130. The deflation of diachronic identity is an informal argument from examples that rests on the method of levels of abstraction, assumed from elsewhere; that this “is not relativism” is one sentence, and that individuation comes before identification is asserted. It is not, as its title suggests, a criterion of personal identity, and its positive answer to the synchronic question, the three-membranes model, is “somewhat figurative” by its author’s word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-656 | A single holistic power of the universe’s configuration, carried by bare matter points, cannot ground a subsystem’s effective wave function without changing the ontology, because the masses in a decoupled subsystem’s Hamiltonian must belong to that subsystem’s particles; dispositions intrinsic to particles or events need no such change | Dorato (2015), LIT-176, read in full in NOTE-105. Against Esfeld et al.’s holistic dispositionalism: when a subsystem effectively decouples, its Hamiltonian’s masses must be intrinsic dispositions of its particles, so the holistic view must alter its ontology between the universal and the effective wave function (pp. 14–15). The argument is moderate and posed partly as questions. The paper’s wider thesis, that events are a common primitive ontology for GRW, Bohm and ψ-antirealist views, shows compatibility only, and Dorato concedes the difference from Esfeld could be verbal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-669 | Reading the universal quantum state as nomological escapes the costs of reading it as a field only by paying in the theory of laws: on the strong reading, modelled on the classical Hamiltonian, a time-dependent ψ makes laws time-indexed unless the universal state is time-independent, as Wheeler–DeWitt would make it; on the weak and functionalist readings ψ need be neither unique nor time-independent, but only within an extended Humeanism whose criterion would equally make classical fields nomological | Chen (2018), LIT-204 (NOTE-175), maps the realist readings and splits the nomological one into strong and weak. Belot (2011), LIT-100 (NOTE-110), ranks the costs of ψ-as-law: time-indexed laws are the serious obstacle, grades of necessity tolerable. Allori (2021), LIT-200 (NOTE-154), makes ψ an ingredient of the law, which may be time-dependent and non-unique, and so concedes Belot’s point that ψ behaves like an initial condition. Each move is an informal argument. Chen reports, without endorsing, the objection that the weak reading is too cheap, and Allori’s reply embraces the case it treats as a reductio. | Proposed |
| THEORY-670 | Ordinary dispositions can be modelled as restricted possibilities individuated by their manifestation alone: ‘fragile’ as manifestation in a sufficient proportion of cases over maximally varied external circumstances, ‘breakable’ as plain possibility; grading by closeness to an ideal world fails for any choice of ideal | Vetter (2014), LIT-109, read in full from the penultimate draft in NOTE-125. A proposal, which the paper says it does not show superior to the conditional conception (pp. 6, 26). Its strongest part is negative: for any ideal world, an Achilles’-heel block that breaks only there counts as fragile, so closeness grading fails. The positive proportion measure is not defined, and the finite, maximally varied set of cases it counts over is admitted to be non-unique. The evidence is ‘-able’ semantics and a COCA count in which none of 226 relevant uses of “disposed to” ascribes a standing tendency to an inanimate object. Finks and masks are left unsolved, and dispositions of fundamental science are set aside. | Proposed |
| THEORY-681 | If every real idea derives from an impression, there is no idea of a simple self persisting through life; the mind is a bundle of perceptions, and the identity ascribed to it is produced by the imagination passing easily along resemblance and causation, as with a rebuilt ship or a growing oak, though Hume’s Appendix concedes that this does not explain what unites the perceptions | Hume (1739, with the Appendix of 1740), LIT-451, read in NOTE-386. The negative half is as strong as the copy principle. The mechanism of the fiction is argued by analogy from cases of usage. The account of what unites the bundle is withdrawn by its author, who names the two principles he cannot reconcile. It does not say there is no self in any sense, and it leaves identity “as it regards our passions” to Book 2. | Proposed |
| THEORY-687 | For empirically equivalent dual theories read naively, adding the common core as a candidate world does not break the underdetermination, and neither do super-empirical virtues or an overarching theory: each route to a single actual world needs a further metaphysical principle, such as the identity of indiscernibles | Le Bihan & Read (2018), LIT-113, read in NOTE-152 from the accepted manuscript. A nontechnical survey whose central argument is informal. It assumes a duality relates empirically equivalent models (weaker than De Haro & Butterfield’s isomorphism of a bare theory), that each model is read naively and internally, and that structuralism is set aside. Its reading said it supports no existing THEORY directly; this files the conditional verdict the survey argues for, and nothing more. | Proposed |
| THEORY-690 | In the physical dualities examined, theoretically inequivalent duals turn out empirically inequivalent, so dualities yield no genuine in-principle underdetermination; where duals would contradict each other a cautious realist is warranted in committing only to their common core, and because the exact cases’ common cores are rich rather than empty, dualities give no support to structural realism | De Haro & Butterfield (2025), LIT-199, read in NOTE-178. A case-by-case argument over the book’s examples, with a logico-semantic fallback (each dual entails the common core) for a hypothetical genuine case. The rich-core verdict is argued from exact cases (bosonization, electric–magnetic duality, T-duality) and does not reach AdS/CFT or M-theory, where structural-realist readings were proposed and the common core is “partial … ongoing work in physics!”. The commitment holds only where an interpreted common core exists, which the authors say is not true in general. | Proposed |
| THEORY-691 | A self is an abstractum like a centre of gravity, posited by interpreting a person’s behaviour and talk, the brain’s own autobiography included; it is as determinate as that story, it can be authored by a process with no self in it, and a body holds as many selves as the points the best story coheres around | Dennett (1992), LIT-442, read in NOTE-364 from a copy-edited transcription. Argued by analogy and by thought experiments whose premises are stipulated, notably that a mindless machine could write a passable novel. It does not say the self is an illusion: a centre of gravity is a legitimate posit that figures in explanations. It is a claim about selves, not about consciousness or about what makes a person persist. | Proposed |
| THEORY-694 | After every function associated with consciousness is explained (discrimination, integration, report, access, attention, control), why these functions are accompanied by experience remains open, because those phenomena are defined by their functions and experience, what it is like for the subject, is not; so experience cannot be reductively explained by any mechanism, though it may be related to the physical by further laws | Chalmers (1995), LIT-406, read in full in NOTE-336, with Nagel (1974), LIT-096, read in NOTE-089, for the subjective character it starts from. The test is whether “you have explained the function but not the phenomenon” is a conceptual mistake: it is for life and reportability, not for experience. The decisive premise, that any physical process could conceptually occur without experience, is asserted and deferred to a book the record holds unread. Nagel’s conclusion is weaker than Chalmers’s: physicalism not refuted but not yet understandable. Naturalistic dualism and the double-aspect theory of information are the proposals built on the gap, not part of it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-867 v2 | The geometry of the colour similarity space does not mark the four unique hues, nor the difference between the black–white axis, along which every grey is a mixture of both ends, and the opponent axes, along which each half shows only one end; so a structuralism on which phenomenal character is fixed by similarity relations alone cannot account for how colour experiences are composed | Aldé (2026), LIT-1348, read in full in NOTE-1055. Two arguments, the unique hues objection and the opposing dimensions objection, from colour facts the paper takes as accepted. The decisive premise of each, that no adequate geometric property marks the facts, rests on inspection of CIELAB and extrapolation to better models; no analysis is reported. The target is similarity structuralism only. | Proposed |
| THEORY-868 v2 | The structuralist methods and evidence in consciousness science support only that experiences have structure or stand in relations to other experiences, not that an experience is nothing but its relations; the stronger, metaphysical thesis implies that relational knowledge fixes what an experience is like, that every new experience changes all the others, and that a system with a single experience is impossible, and each consequence is doubtful | Negro (2025), LIT-1346, read in full in NOTE-1054. The distinctions (three structuralisms; having, being in and being a structure) are sound and the arguments valid. Each argument’s decisive premise is an intuition or a conceivability claim, and a structuralist such as Lyre (THEORY-880) accepts the holism Negro takes to be absurd. The paper also says that making judgement constitutive saves the view only by aligning it with eliminativism, which bears directly on CLAIM-412. | Proposed |
| THEORY-872 | A self-model compresses the sensory effects of a system’s own activity by positing one stable common cause, at fast and slow timescales; there is such a pattern in the signal, so the self is real as a pattern and unreal as a substance, and realists and anti-realists about selves who accept this agree on the facts and differ on the criterion of reality | Gładziejewski (2025), LIT-1360, read in full in NOTE-1056, §4.1, after Hohwy & Michael (2017) and Letheby & Gerrans (2017), neither of which the record holds. An interpretation, not a result. The paper calls its self section “an initial sketch”. It does not say that the self-model exaggerates the self’s unity, though the exchange that filed the work said so. It says the single common cause is a compression, and that the verdict on selves turns on criteria. Its one candidate for a self-model that misdescribes is a dissociative case better compressed by two narrative selves. | Proposed |
| THEORY-877 | Learning a generative model of sensory data extracts real patterns in Dennett’s sense, so the manifest image is a structural description of the sensory signal, constrained by its external source but silent on what realizes the structure; two subjects whose sensory streams match, one envatted, therefore have equally veridical manifest images, and what differs between them, the realizers, lies outside what perception can represent | Gładziejewski (2025), LIT-1360, read in full in NOTE-1056, §§2–3, drawing on Chalmers’s structuralism and veridicalism (2018, 2022), which the record does not hold. The cognitive half rests on a realist reading of predictive processing and on an analogy between free energy and description length. The veridicalism follows only if manifest content is wholly structural, which is assumed. Projective properties (cuteness) are allowed at one end of a continuum. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1068 | In the founding statement of relational quantum mechanics the states and values of systems are relative to other systems, but the systems are not: the world is assumed decomposed, possibly in several ways, into systems each characterized by the questions that can be asked of it and a finite information capacity, so the relata precede the relations, as an assumption and without an ontology of events | Rovelli (1996), LIT-1635, read in arXiv v2 in NOTE-1227, §§II.C, III.A–B, III.D and IV.A. Active as a textual fact about the paper. It bears out, for 1996, what THEORY-1071 takes from Faye and Jaksland, who quote later texts for it. It does not say that RQM must keep systems prior, nor that the systems are uniquely given: the decomposition is assumed, not argued, and allowed to vary. | Active |
| THEORY-1071 | Quantum mechanics does not entail agential realism: Bohmian mechanics reproduces its predictions with an ontology of individual particles on determinate trajectories, and relational quantum mechanics, the interpretation Barad names as closest, makes values relational while keeping the systems prior to their interactions | Faye & Jaksland (2021), LIT-1672, read in NOTE-1220, §5. Active: the non-entailment follows from the existence of an empirically equivalent interpretation with a different metaphysics, and the authors do not promote that interpretation. It does not say agential realism is inconsistent with quantum mechanics; that is THEORY-1091, a separate and weaker argument. | Active |
| THEORY-1080 v2 | In relational quantum mechanics as Rovelli first stated it, the relation between two observers’ descriptions is itself a quantum fact relative to a third system, so no observer’s view can be deduced from another’s and there is no description in toto, only a net of partial descriptions; the views are held consistent only in that the third system predicts correlated outcomes, which is shown for a single measurement and asserted in general | Rovelli (1996), LIT-1635, read in arXiv v2 in NOTE-1227, §§II.D, III.D, IV.A–B. The first half (no deducible relation between views, no in-toto description) is Rovelli’s stated position, well supported by his text. The second half reports that consistency is shown for one case (von Neumann’s correlation, p. 9) and left to the reader in general (p. 15); whether it holds in general is THEORY-1222, Proposed. Rovelli’s own relativity analogy breaks where relativity supplies an invariant, which bears on QUESTION-021 by analogy only. | Active |
| THEORY-1081 v2 | Di Biagio and Rovelli locate the Frauchiger–Renner contradiction and the violation of the Local Friendliness inequalities in one step, a superobserver using facts relative to a friend he holds in full quantum control as if they were his own, which is the classical sum rule applied where those facts are not stable for him; they base quantum ontology on facts relative to systems rather than on stable facts, arguing that stability is itself relational and only approximate and counting the Local Friendliness violation as evidence, with an absolute macroreality emerging only approximately and only relative to systems for which decoherence is strong | Di Biagio and Rovelli (2021), LIT-1666, read in NOTE-1226, §2 (pp. 7–11). The translation of Frauchiger and Renner’s assumption (C) and of Bong et al.’s absoluteness of observed events into the use of eq. (3) across contexts is the paper’s and is clear. That nothing else goes wrong is cited to others, inter-observer agreement is one sentence, and an agent reasoning about himself is left undone. What the paper argues is held; whether relative facts cohere in general is THEORY-1230’s question. | Active |
| THEORY-1083 | Barad holds agential realism to be naturalized metaphysics justified by quantum mechanics and applied once, to the one reality, with its scope extended to the lifeworld; she rejects both reading it as an analogy and reading it as a template that quantum mechanics and other domains each instantiate | Jaksland (2024), LIT-1673, read in NOTE-1230, from Barad’s own statements (2007, 24 and 85, with her dismissals of analogy at 2007, 6, 7, 18, 24, 70 and 88). Active as a reading of what Barad holds, which is well supported by her text as quoted. It does not say that the conception she holds is sound: that rests on agential realism being correct as quantum mechanics, which Faye and Jaksland dispute (THEORY-1071). It does say that a use of her concepts outside physics by structural comparison is a use she disowns. | Active |
| THEORY-1086 | A fundamental metaphysics bears on the metaphysics of the lifeworld only through features that admit no approximation; without any, a relational world can approximate one of separable individuals, and the independence of social theorizing from fundamental metaphysics is then real but contingent, on the size of Planck’s constant, not principled | Jaksland (2024), LIT-1673, read in NOTE-1230, reconstructing an argument Barad “only ever alludes to”. It is a conditional and the author leaves its antecedent open: whether any ontological feature is all-or-nothing is “an open question”. He finds individualism “immediately more agreeable” as approximable, and the dualisms the harder case. The contingency half is argued (a counterfactual on Planck’s constant); the no-approximation half is a candidate list, not a demonstration. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1091 | Agential realism has no answer to the measurement problem as it stands: holding that measurement never disentangles apparatus and object, it cannot borrow relational quantum mechanics’ treatment of the wave function as bookkeeping without giving up the ontological holism, and its appeal to an improper mixture does not explain why one value is found | Faye & Jaksland (2021), LIT-1672, read in NOTE-1220, §5. Proposed: the authors present it as a challenge (“There might be other more subtle ways”), and conclude only that consistency with quantum mechanics is unshown (“a leap of faith”), not that agential realism is incoherent. The exchange of 2026-10-27 reported it as “an unresolved measurement problem”, which is the strength the text supports. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1118 | McKenna and Coates argue, with Dryden and with Buss and Westlund, that a condition on free agency stated only in the agent’s present psychological structure is met by an agent whose structure a manipulator installed, so a mesh account must count that agent free or add a historical condition; Frankfurt, read first-hand, takes the first option | The manipulation argument as its sources make it, split from THEORY-040 by the tenth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern, so that a claim needing only the argument’s first half can stand on it. All five sources were read in full (NOTE-270, NOTE-266, NOTE-267, NOTE-545, NOTE-264). Whether any historical condition escapes the argument stays THEORY-040’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1194 | Clark and Chalmers argue that if belief is individuated by functional role, an external store that is constantly consulted, directly available and automatically endorsed can carry a standing belief, so that the material vehicles of some mental states extend beyond the skin; the step from coupling to parthood rests on that premise and on a parity principle they state rather than argue | What the extended-mind paper argues, split from THEORY-579 by the sixteenth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern (ADR-058’s route), so that CLAIM-175, which argues “on the extended-mind thesis’s own terms”, can stand on the statement of those terms. Both papers were read in full (NOTE-180, NOTE-363), and Clark (2005) says in his own words that the parity principle was not argued. Whether the conditional holds, that coupling of this kind makes a store part of a mind, stays THEORY-579’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1222 | In relational quantum mechanics as stated in Rovelli (1996), rules (i) and (ii), that there is no state except within a further observer’s information and no information without interaction, exclude any contradiction between observers’ views: what a third system predicts of two observers’ information always agrees with what it finds on interacting with them | Rovelli’s general consistency claim (1996), LIT-1635, §III.D, p. 15, kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-1080 as a report (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). Shown for one measurement (p. 9) and introduced in general with “The reader may convince himself”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1230 | In relational quantum mechanics, with facts fixed by interaction and the classical sum rule used only within one context or where facts are stable, facts relative to different systems never yield contradictory predictions in extended Wigner’s-friend scenarios, and a superobserver’s later facts agree with his friend’s | The consistency Di Biagio and Rovelli claim for relational quantum mechanics, filed beside THEORY-1081 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1081, Active, holds what they argue; whether relative facts cohere in general is this entry’s question, with THEORY-1081’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1276 | In Simondon’s ontology, as his organization-studies readers take it, information is not a signal transmitted between finished entities but a disparity between two differently ordered domains of a metastable system, and its meaning is the new structure that transduction produces in resolving it | Iliadis (2013), LIT-1911, read in NOTE-1485, with Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922. The reading of Simondon on which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (2024) build their account of communication and meaning. Proposed: both sources are exegesis in their authors’ translations, and Simondon’s text could not be checked. It does not say that information has no quantitative sense, or that meaning can be identified before the resolution occurs. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1282 | Affect, in Massumi’s sense, is the felt transition of a body’s power to affect and be affected toward a diminished or augmented capacitation, offered as a proposition to be regenerated in each use rather than a definition to apply | Massumi (2009), LIT-1905, read in NOTE-1488, p. 1; reprinted in Politics of Affect (2015, pp. 47–48), LIT-1907. The definition is Spinoza’s as Deleuze took it up, and it runs both ways, diminished or augmented. Massumi says it is “not a general definition that you can apply”. Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902) quote it exactly and then apply only its augmenting half, as a definition of agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1286 | Affect is not transmitted from one body or event to another; it is reactivated anew in each event, and bodies cued by the same event are attuned to it differentially rather than made alike | Massumi (2009), LIT-1905, read in NOTE-1488, pp. 6 and 9: affect “is not a content that can be transported from one event to another … an event logic, not a logic of transmission or communication”, and there is “affective difference in the same event”. This sits uneasily with the “excess action” that Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902) have passing between individuation processes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1314 | Contextual emergence, on which an emergent phenomenon’s parts are necessary but not sufficient, needs a functional boundary between the phenomenon and its context, without which the context could be folded into the base and the account collapse into weak emergence or global supervenience; and the subject of attention is contextually emergent in this sense, its boundary being the skull, meninges and brain stem, so that its macro-level patterns constrain micro-level activity with a power that is not reducible to the parts and needs neither downward nor circular causation | Jennings (2026), LIT-1963, §§4–6, read in NOTE-1508, with Bishop and Atmanspacher 2006 (LIT-1987) and Bishop, Silberstein and Pexton 2022 (LIT-1993), both unread, for contextual emergence. The boundary condition is the paper’s own addition (fn. 15). Proposed, with a sharp edge: the paper’s reason that the boundary resists micro redescription is that its properties “are macro-level ones” (p. 20), which is the point at issue, and its neural evidence fits weak emergence too. Bears on CLAIM-334, whose supervenience premise it denies. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1333 | Bishop’s contextual emergence, as stated in his 2024 SEP revision, is an ontological account: stability conditions not given at smaller and faster scales (parameter values, dimensionality, large-scale flows) constrain or enable what is possible and actual at those scales, as convection rolls constrain the motions of fluid molecules, without the brute new causal powers of strong emergence; laws bound possibility and contexts fix actualization | Bishop, SEP “Chaos” (revision of 2024-10-11), LIT-1961, §§6.2–6.3, read in NOTE-1535, summarizing Bishop, Silberstein and Pexton 2022 (LIT-1993, not reached). Active as a statement of the view, checked verbatim. It corrects the record’s gloss (THEORY-1314, NOTE-1508) that Bishop’s contextual emergence concerns only the well-definedness of a higher-level description; it is not evidence that the view is true, and it sets the view against causal powers, not for them. | Active |