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 science — what science is and what its theories say about the world — realism and structural realism, explanation, causation and evidence, the interpretation of physical theories (group: philosophy).
100 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-002 v7 | Convergence of representations, in the Platonic hypothesis’s sense, is convergence of kernels, which fixes representations only up to the symmetry group of what is observed; whether closeness in distribution implies closeness of representation depends on the distance used | An inference joining Huh et al.’s Platonic hypothesis (ANTH-LIT-458) to Nielsen et al. (LIT-253) and Harvey, Larsen & Williams (LIT-250). It does not refute the hypothesis; it says what the hypothesis can and cannot mean. | Proposed |
| THEORY-010 | Grangier and Auffèves’s contextual objectivity is an ontological postulate, not contextuality in either formal sense: its one argued consequence, unpredictability after a change of context, is reproduced by an epistemically restricted classical model | Places Grangier & Auffèves (2018), LIT-077, against the two formal notions (LIT-016, LIT-003) and against Spekkens’s epistricted models (LIT-007). The placement is the record’s, joining NOTE-044’s reading with LIT-007 and LIT-016; Grangier’s own derivations are not held. | Proposed |
| THEORY-023 v4 | Current evidence cannot settle whether an AI system is conscious: mimicry undercuts behavioural evidence and architectural indicators presuppose the disputed computational functionalism, so the dispute is over what counts as evidence as well as the answer | Birch (2025), LIT-111: behavioural markers are “gamed”, and architectural markers are “Janus-faced”, giving a two-level deadlock. Schwitzgebel (LIT-191) argues mimicry undercuts but does not rebut, and that the functionalist theories face minimal instantiation. Seth (LIT-135) makes conscious AI conditional on functionalism plus substrate flexibility. Butlin et al. (LIT-056) assume functionalism. The readings agree the question is currently unsettleable. They contest whether that is permanent and which way the prior leans. This says nothing about whether any AI is conscious. Block (2002, LIT-639) argues that for a perfect functional duplicate on another substrate we lack even a conception of the evidence; Block (2009, LIT-632) states the biological premise from the other side. | Proposed |
| THEORY-024 v2 | Classical Boolean logic is restored when a presheaf of contextual data acquires a global section or is sheafified | Ghose (2025), LIT-276 — asserts that the Heyting algebra of truth values “becomes Boolean” when the presheaf data collapse to a global section, and that sheaves encode Boolean reasoning. Both claims are asserted, not proved. The record’s readings refute them. The internal logic of a topos is fixed by the base category and its topology, not by whether one presheaf has a section (Isham–Butterfield, LIT-325, §6). Sheaf toposes such as Sh(ℝ) are not Boolean (NOTE-249). The contextuality criterion itself is untouched. | Rejected |
| THEORY-030 v3 | For a memory evolving reversibly with its environment, Landauer’s bound prices only steps that lose logical distinguishability, at least k ln 2 of entropy per bit lost, exported to the environment and not necessarily as heat, so copying onto a blank register, measuring or evaluating a bit has no minimum cost; learning a label has a floor only in total entropy production, at least the information learnt, which in Goldt and Seifert’s perceptron can be paid in the weights’ own entropy with vanishing heat | Bennett (2003), LIT-360: the cost attaches to many-to-one maps of the logical state, at least k ln 2 of entropy per bit exported to non-information-bearing degrees of freedom, which “need not” be heat. The record derives it for a memory and environment evolving reversibly from an uncorrelated start: the environment’s entropy rises by at least the logical entropy lost, H(X | f(X)), and an injective step has no floor, attained exactly by a permutation. Goldt & Seifert (LIT-308) bound information learnt by total entropy production, payable with vanishing heat in their toy model. It does not license a k_BT ln 2 heat floor per judgment, per gradient step or per bit learnt. Whether the bound survives without reversible dynamics is QUESTION-215. | 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-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-053 | A treatment’s efficacy is not evidence for its theory of change: only change in the theorised process that is specific and comes before the outcome bears on it, and moving the process without moving the outcome counts against the theory | Salkovskis, Sighvatsson and Sigurdsson (LIT-538): “The effectiveness of a treatment is not evidence for the validity of the theory on which it is based”, with one exception, that changing the theory’s crucial factor without changing the problem disconfirms it. Hofmann and Hayes (LIT-544), from the other wing of CBT: a model whose process cannot be shown to apply “is incorrect and needs to be set aside” even if the intervention works, and a procedure that fails to move the process leaves the model untested. Active because it is close to a logical point and both state it. What it does not say is that mediation proves a mechanism; both sources deny that. | Active |
| THEORY-057 | Emotion categories are populations of variable instances grouped by the perceiver’s concepts, not natural kinds with a shared neural or appraisal mechanism | Barrett (2017), LIT-542: degeneracy, population thinking, and a table of findings in which no region, network, pattern or neuron is consistent for an emotion category. From these she concludes that categories such as fear are populations of variable instances, grouped by a goal and constructed by categorization with a concept. She rejects basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories as positing a “Lockean essence”. This is the record’s only read statement of the view. The record’s philosophy holdings sharpen it. Pernu (LIT-147) shows that many-to-one realisation at a fine grain does not rule out one variable at a coarser grain, so degeneracy alone does not carry the conclusion, and Table 1 has to. Searle (LIT-482) shows that Barrett’s comparison with money is to observer-relative function, not to institutions. Rivals the appraisal account, THEORY-055. Proposed: one theoretical paper, no independent test, and the reply 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-066 | A Markov-blanket partition is defined relative to a chosen internal set, so a graph has one around almost any set of nodes, and the formalism alone does not say which set is the system | The formal core of Bruineberg et al.’s critique (LIT-603, C4 in NOTE-447). In a directed acyclic graph the blanket of a node set A is its parents, children and the children’s other parents, and A is conditionally independent of everything outside A and its blanket. That holds for every A, so any set whose blanket leaves something outside gets a valid internal, blanket and external partition. Having a blanket therefore picks out no set. In Friston’s soup (LIT-526) the set was picked by spectral clustering with k = 8, not by the blanket. Active because it is a short derivation that anyone can check. It covers graphical (Pearl) blankets and the 2013 procedure. It does not cover the later sparse-coupling definitions at nonequilibrium steady state, which the record has not read. | Active |
| THEORY-073 v2 | In Friston’s 2013 formulation and the applications the record holds, a Markov blanket does not individuate a system: where it falls is fixed by modelling choices made before it is traced (the coupling graph, the internal set and the time at which steady state is assumed), and a blanket read from a fixed graph is the same whether the system produced the boundary or it was imposed | Bruineberg et al. (LIT-603) and Raja et al. (LIT-598) argue, by different routes, that the Markov blanket of the free-energy literature is placed and not found. The formal core is THEORY-066: the partition takes the internal set as input. This account adds what the critiques show about practice. In Friston’s soup (LIT-526) the graph was built from one kind of coupling and steady state was assumed when the run stopped. In published applications the blanket sits wherever the model needs it: in the receptors of a brain, the membrane of a bacillus, the beam joining two pendulums. The formalism also gives the same description to a membrane the cell makes and a beam nobody’s states make. So the blanket presupposes the boundary it is offered as the criterion of. Active since 2026-10-27, narrowed to the 2013 formulation and the applications held. The later steady-state definitions have not been read, and the unrestricted claim is THEORY-1097, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-091 | A deficit in which consciousness and a capacity are lost together does not show that the capacity is a function of phenomenal consciousness, since access is lost too and the capacity is one the machinery of access has | Block (1995), LIT-643, §6. Marcel, Flanagan, van Gulick and Schacter argue from the thirsty blindsight patient who does not reach for the water, and Searle from Penfield’s petit mal automatisms, that a function of phenomenal consciousness is to let information guide action. In blindsight access is missing too, and in petit mal nothing shows experience is missing at all. “The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.” That experience causes access, so that the function is experience’s after all, is “a bold hypothesis, not a fallacy”, and the deficit cannot decide it. Proposed: single-source, and the distinction it rests on is argued from conceivable cases. | Proposed |
| THEORY-094 | Neither report nor no-report paradigms isolate the neural basis of consciousness, because post-perceptual cognition that tracks the percept persists without report; only a design that removes differential post-perceptual cognition does | Block (2007), LIT-646, framed the methodological puzzle: the neural basis of experience can be found only by deciding whether it includes the machinery of access, and the evidence comes through report. The no-report paradigm was the answer. Block (2019), LIT-637, argues it has “a fatal flaw”: subjects not asked to report still think about what they see, and that thought is aligned with the percept (the “bored monkey” problem). Eliminating report isolates the basis of experience “only if it eliminates post-perceptual cognitive processing” correlated with the percept. Brascamp et al.’s inconspicuous rivalry, whose switches subjects detected at chance, is the one such design Block offers. The method is specific to rivalry so far, and Block says there may be no general solution. | Proposed |
| THEORY-125 | A group can itself be in an emotional state that is not its members’ states in aggregation, when its distributed routines integrate the capacities an emotion requires into one action-oriented representation; because emotions are functional kinds such a state need not be felt, and no actual case has yet been shown | Huebner (2010), LIT-702: a genuinely collective emotion is a state of a group that “could not be exhaustively characterized in terms of intentional states of individuals in aggregation”. Fear requires danger detection, redeployment of attention, system-wide preparatory change and their coordination into one state with indicative content and imperative force; a distributed system can integrate routines that way. Some individual emotions are non-conscious, so a group’s need not be felt, and emotion kinds are functional (“like vodka”), so lacking homologous mechanisms does not exclude groups. The paper establishes a possibility, not an instance: its worked case, the USS Palau crew, turns out to be “collective detection of danger in the absence of a fear response”, and the replacement, the 2008 McCain–Palin campaign, is offered as “intuitively plausible” pending anthropological data. Proposed. | Proposed |
| 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-141 v2 | In a major evolutionary transition, where formerly free-living units come to form a higher-level unit, the collective is stable only if selection between collectives comes to trump selection among the units within them, typically through mechanisms such as policing, kinship and division of labour that align the interests of the units; the levels at which selection acts are then a product of evolution, to be explained rather than assumed | Okasha (2022), LIT-749, restating with Buss and Michod a principle of the major transitions: a new collective can be undone by defectors, and succeeds only if higher-level selection trumps lower-level selection, usually through policing or aligned interests. The transitions make the hierarchy an explanandum. Proposed: a review stating general principles that Okasha himself says may explain any one transition only coarsely. | Proposed |
| THEORY-143 v3 | When a group learns only about the options its members pursue and good evidence is scarce, sparser communication makes it more likely to settle on the better option, at a large cost in speed; when evidence is plentiful, sparsity only slows learning | Zollman (2007), LIT-724, simulated Bala and Goyal’s bandit model: cycles chose the better method more often than complete graphs, and more slowly; density, not centrality, predicted failure. Rosenstock et al. (2017), LIT-733, found the effect only where inquiry is hard: close alternatives, small groups, small batches. Proposed: all of it is simulation, and real communities’ place in parameter space is unknown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-146 v2 | In Holman and Bruner’s bandit model of honest Bayesian researchers whose beliefs funding cannot touch, who differ in method and whose influence and training of newcomers follow productivity, industry funding of those whose methods already favour its drug lowers, in the runs their figures report, the share of the community on the better treatment, and has no effect without methodological diversity; at the one setting reported, an independent funder that counts industry-funded trials toward its merit threshold lowers that share further, and one that excludes them raises it | Holman & Bruner (2017), LIT-744. In a Zollman bandit model with methodological diversity, productivity-weighted influence and turnover, industry funding of agents whose methods favour the drug lowers the chance of converging on the better action, though no agent’s beliefs respond to funding. A merit-based independent funder worsens it; one ignoring industry-funded trials counters it. Held as what the model shows; whether real fields work this way is QUESTION-315. | Active |
| THEORY-148 | A group learning by trying needs diversity in what its members pursue that lasts long enough to survive misleading early evidence and then gives way to consensus; limited communication and stubborn priors each supply it, and together they make it permanent, so the group never settles | Zollman (2010), LIT-735: in a bandit model with beta priors, sparse networks and extreme priors each maintain diversity of pursuit and each improve reliability, but combined they keep diversity alive so long that agents fail to converge. Rosenstock et al. LIT-733 find this the result that is robust across the models they test. Proposed: shown only in simulation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-151 v2 | Scientific objectivity belongs to a community’s critical practices rather than to individual method: because evidence bears on hypotheses only through background assumptions that no evidence supports, a community is objective to the degree that its criticism has venues, uptake, public standards and tempered equality of intellectual authority | Longino’s critical contextual empiricism, as she states it in the SEP (LIT-725). Underdetermination leaves background assumptions that only community criticism can check. Criticism confers objectivity only if it meets four norms: venues, uptake, public standards, and tempered equality. Proposed because the record reads the summary, not the books, and the norms’ epistemic benefit is argued rather than shown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-243 v3 | In the three-unit identity network x ↦ x(1, 0, 1) ↦ (0, 2, 1)·h, aligning the input with the third unit and aligning it with the direction (h₁ + h₂)/√2, two alignments related by an orthogonal change of basis, pass every interchange intervention on the input equally, so interchange interventions on that variable alone do not fix which internal direction mediates it | Wu et al. (2024), LIT-961, Appendix A, and Makelov et al. (2023), LIT-968, Appendix A.3 and §8, read in NOTE-809 and NOTE-782. Both rotate the same three-unit identity network. The input aligns with h₃ in one basis and with (h₁ + h₂)/√2 in the other, equally well under interchange interventions on the input (re-derived 2026-10-20). The reply says intervening on further variables separates them; that was not checked. Makelov et al. rest their verdict on component boundaries; the reply rests its on the interventions performed. Shown exactly for one constructed network only; whether trained networks have such ties is open (QUESTION-234). | Active |
| THEORY-249 | Whether a system has agency can be settled only relative to a reference frame: each of four conditions of agency (a boundary, being the source of action, meaningful goal-directedness and adaptivity) needs a commitment outside the system before it can be decided | Abel et al. (2025), LIT-969, read in full in NOTE-793. A four-page position paper, argued and not proved: each condition is shown two-valued under two plausible choices by citing an earlier result (Jiang; Kenton et al., LIT-909; inverse-RL underdetermination; Zadeh). The premises are existential and the conclusion universal, so what is supported is that some attributions of agency depend on the frame. That the choices are arbitrary is asserted, and the paper itself floats predictive power as a way to choose. | 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-295 v3 | In a community whose consensus model is replaced whenever a single sound pairwise model comparison favours the challenger, which models get proposed can hold the consensus on a false model while results reproduce almost perfectly, so reproducibility need not track convergence to truth | Devezer, Nardin, Baumgaertner and Buzbas (2019), LIT-988, read in full in NOTE-792. In a Markov-chain and agent-based model where each step tests one proposed linear model against the consensus by AIC or SC, replication cannot change the transition matrix. A boundary-testing population reproduces almost perfectly while rarely holding the true model, and correlations between reproducibility and truth depend on the strategy mix. The consensus is memoryless, scientists hold no beliefs, and an equal strategy mix is shown only never to be the worst, not best. | Active |
| THEORY-298 | Report-based evidence cannot test whether posterior cortex suffices for experience, because report itself needs anterior activity, and no marker that bypasses report has a validation resting neither on introspection nor on a contested theory | Seth & Bayne (2022), LIT-982, “Evaluating theories of consciousness” and Box 3, read in NOTE-849 from the accepted manuscript. An argument in a review, not a result: the verification of posterior-sufficiency predictions “relies on subjective report …, which in turn requires anterior cortical activity”, and validating a non-report marker by theory borrows a contested theory, by introspection, unreliable report. It says the methods are lacking “at present”, not that the question is unanswerable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-410 | Brain–computer interface decoding does not show intentions to be causes distinct from their neural realisers: what is many-to-one realised there is a coarse cortical variable over single-neuron patterns, and each intention matches one value of it, so under proportional difference-making the evidence fits identifying the intention with that variable | Pernu (2018), LIT-147, read in NOTE-091. A conceptual argument that turns on an empirical premise the paper asserts and does not examine: that each intention corresponds to one ensemble-average firing value. Real decoders are not simple averages, and whether the mapping holds across sessions or subjects is not checked. It is scoped by its own footnote 1 to difference-making with proportionality. | Proposed |
| THEORY-413 | ’Unit of selection’ names four separable roles, interactor, reproducer, manifestor of adaptation and beneficiary, and being an interactor at a level does not require engineering adaptations at that level, so showing that a level lacks them does not show it is not a unit of selection | Lloyd’s SEP entry (2005, revised 2024), LIT-160, read in NOTE-184. Her own programme, stated in the first person, and advocacy as well as a map. The four-question anatomy is the firm part. The diagnosis that conflating interactor and manifestor is “the most common error” is asserted, not counted. Its rulings on kin and group selection, the cheater problem and the Price equation are one school’s, not consensus. | Proposed |
| THEORY-419 v2 | In a structural causal model of autonomous equations, with intervention do(X = x) defined, as Pearl defines it, as a surgery that deletes X’s own equation, sets X to x and solves the rest, and with observing X = x violating no equation and amounting to ordinary conditioning, models that agree on every observational distribution can disagree on the effect of an intervention, and in a structural equation y = βx + ε the coefficient β is the rate of change of E[Y | do(x)], which equals the regression slope of Y on X only when X is uncorrelated with ε | Pearl (2009), LIT-894, skimmed in NOTE-696 from four excerpts the author posts: the contents, the second-edition preface, §§5.3.2–5.4.1 and the Epilogue, 46 of some 480 pages. The account is well established and the excerpts state it in full; Proposed because it rests on a skim. The surgery needs autonomous equations and a diagram saying which equation belongs to which variable. The excerpts state the three rules of the do-calculus without derivation, and contain no three-level hierarchy of association, intervention and counterfactual. | Active |
| THEORY-422 | In the standard formal models of group learning, no communication network is best for every epistemic problem: costly transmission favours minimally connected or star networks, pooling of estimates by averaging favours regular networks, and learning by trying in bandit problems can favour sparse ones, so a group’s network cannot be judged until its learning problem is known | Zollman (2013), LIT-716, a survey read in NOTE-567. Each result it gathers is proved or simulated in its source (Bala and Goyal, Jackson and Wolinsky, DeGroot, Hegselmann and Krause, Zollman). Under their idealisations the optimal structure changes with the problem, so neither “too little communication” nor unequal centrality is by itself an epistemic pathology. It is a claim about models: utilitarian optimality only, with fairness, robustness and the route to the optimum left out. | Active |
| THEORY-423 | Statements that are visibly false to anyone who checks, such as ‘long-term’ for a three-day study or ‘assault’ contradicted by video, persist in science, paid testimony and official statements when the community that hears them accepts them as terms of art and attaches no cost to them, so that those willing to make things up gain over those who are not | Gelman (2025), LIT-014, a blog post its author calls a rant, read in NOTE-019. An incentive account from three to five anecdotes: false phrasing helps a case, a channel (journals, courts, media) carries it, insiders treat it as a term of art, and nothing follows, so by a Gresham’s-law dynamic honest argument loses. Nothing is measured, and the post is inconsistent on whether the speakers know they are lying. | Proposed |
| THEORY-438 | The understanding deep networks reach is characteristically fractured: it can be real, by the test of stable tracking under structure-preserving perturbation, but it is symbolically misaligned, non-reductive, locally fractured, proxy-dependent and representationally fragmented, because the loss rewards any predictive patchwork and does not press it to unify | Freeborn (2026), LIT-131, read in NOTE-123. The Fractured Understanding Hypothesis is argued from four small demonstrations and cited literature, with no test of how common the five features are. The abstract names three features and §7.5 five. The paper also applies its own criteria inconsistently: its Othello verdict uses post hoc probes that it excludes from the agent. The definition of understanding it rests on is an explication, not a finding. | 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-442 | Where the non-epistemic consequences of error are foreseeable, sound scientific reasoning requires weighing them in the internal choices that carry inductive risk, and non-epistemic values then enter legitimately only indirectly, through the costs of error, never as reasons to think a claim true | Douglas (2000), LIT-139, read in NOTE-145. The normative half of the paper. It rests on a premise the paper declares “beyond the scope” and does not argue, that scientists are morally responsible for foreseeable consequences of error (p. 563). The direct/indirect line is drawn sharply in the conclusion but only sketched, and the reply that scientists could report uncertainty instead of accepting is not engaged. | Proposed |
| THEORY-446 | Organism–environment reciprocal causation, taken diachronically, unrolls into an acyclic sequence of organism, environment and experienced-environment states joined by interventionist arrows; on that representation each niche-construction type has a characteristic causal pattern, and multi-species cases come apart only if organism and environment are kept distinct | Baedke, Fábregas-Tejeda & Prieto (2021), LIT-110, read in NOTE-111. A conceptual and visual model, worked by example for each type of niche construction and for two multi-species cases. There is no formal semantics, no completeness result and no empirical test; formalization is deferred. It sets synchronic co-constitution aside rather than refuting it, and the claim that the boundary is an “epistemic necessity” is stronger than the argument, which shows only that the model can draw one usefully. | Proposed |
| THEORY-451 | A singular causal claim, that C will contribute or did contribute to E in a particular setting, is warranted only by joint evidence on each step of the causal process there, its causal principle, its support factors and the absence of its derailers, which no single method supplies; a well-run RCT secures at most the study population’s average effect, and often not even that rigorously, and its result is not by its method evidence about any other population | Cartwright (2021), LIT-213, read in NOTE-161. The point that RCT results are not by the method evidence about another population (save under random sampling from it) is strong and standard. That no method or handful of methods can warrant a singular claim is argued from the diversity of facts a causal-process theory of change needs, with one illustrative case. That such theories yield reliable predictions is asserted, with no track record; the paper gives no method for weighing the evidence and little on transport. The critique of RCT rigour is internal to the author’s own reconstruction of “rigour”. | 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-459 | Exact duality between two models is incompatible with ontological emergence of one from the other, reductive or not, because a duality is an isomorphism and ontological emergence needs a non-injective linkage whose interpretation does not commute; the two combine only when emergence runs beside the duality, as along the radial direction in AdS/CFT, through an approximate duality, or as merely epistemic emergence | De Haro & Butterfield (2025), LIT-199, §14.3, read in NOTE-178. A formal argument from equinumerosity and surjectivity, strictly proven for finite sets, with an argument on physical grounds for the infinite case (fn. 57). Emergence here is novel reference in the domain of application, a semantic condition, not an information measure. AdS/CFT is the exception only to incompatibility with non-epistemic emergence, not to “not indicative”: on a theoretically equivalent reading, its “emergent gravity” “cannot be understood as ontological emergence”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-463 | In classical statistical mechanics a strictly irreversible approach to equilibrium cannot come from the isolated Hamiltonian dynamics alone: the fine-grained Gibbs entropy is constant and bounded systems recur, so each account surveyed either weakens the target to typical or long-run behaviour or adds something from outside the dynamics | Frigg & Werndl (2023), LIT-114, the SEP entry, read in NOTE-103. The impossibility half rests on standard consequences of Liouville’s theorem, time-reversal invariance and Poincaré recurrence. The classification half is the survey’s: it is stated account by account, not argued as a general result. The entry is classical only, excludes the direction of time, and reports rather than settles the disputes about each repair. | Active |
| THEORY-465 | Being reproduced does not entail reproducing: genes of multicellular organisms, like hearts, are reproducees with little reproductive autonomy and differ from hearts in reproductive causal control, and material overlap between parent and offspring is required of reproducers, which are whole life cycles, but not of reproducees | Bourrat (2025), LIT-157, read in NOTE-100. A definitional framework with no model or data. Both measures are recipes and neither is computed. The proxy for autonomy (conditional mutual information) measures resemblance given the environment, not the range of backgrounds the definition names, and the two recipes given for it differ. The overlap claim rests on a premise shown only for retroviruses, and the conclusion’s “necessarily” outruns it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-469 | Because persistence (mean absolute fitness at least 1) and selection (fitness differences) are logically independent, niche construction theory’s evolutionary niche, read externally as the factors producing fitness differences in a population, differs in extension from the realized population ecological niche even after unit and modality are matched, so it is not a simple translation of Hutchinson’s niche | Trappes (2021), LIT-169, read in NOTE-155. The non-identity follows from a conceptual argument the reading grades strong. The three kinds of case that populate the gap are weaker: habitat degradation rests on a projected persistence failure, commensalism on one field study after the author’s first candidate failed, and non-limiting resources on a “possible example”. The result is scoped to Odling-Smee, Laland & Feldman’s 2003 niche concept and to the externalist reading of selection pressure. It does not say the two niches differ much; they “still coincide to a large extent”. | Active |
| 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-491 | Of the five standard arguments that randomisation gives a clinical trial special evidential weight, only the selection-bias argument is sound, and it supports only taking allocation out of the experimenters’ hands; given balance on plausible confounders, a placebo or active control and blinding, randomisation is argued to add nothing, since balance on unknown confounders is not even probable in the one division a trial makes | Worrall (2007), LIT-175, read in NOTE-126. The case against the unknown-confounders argument is conceptual: frequentist balance is a long-run claim about repeated divisions, and a trial divides once. It does not show that randomised designs are no more reliable in practice than matched ones, and the meta-research cited is mixed. The selection-bias argument is conceded as “cast-iron”, so the account does not say randomisation is worthless. Haphazard allocation is asserted to serve as well, without discussing whether such rules are predictable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-528 | The cases offered for extended cognition are explained at least as well by embedded cognition, on which the organism leans heavily on external props, and memory research finds that external stores lack the interference, generation effect and power-law learning and forgetting of internal memory, so a kind spanning both does no explanatory work and conservatism favours the embedded account | Rupert (2004), LIT-422, read in NOTE-343. The past-endorsement dilemma is strong: without it, directory assistance makes Otto believe every listed number; with it, the organism’s endorsement is the final authority. The memory comparisons are moderate: the internal side is cited research, the external side is thought experiment, and no experiment on an external store is run or cited. The step from “different fine-grained kinds” to “no useful coarse kind” is a challenge plus conservatism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-537 | Warrant for a type-level causal claim in biomedical and social science comes from eliminating the relevant alternative accounts of its support, not from the kind of study that produced the data, so a randomised trial earns its standing only by eliminating many alternatives at once | Reiss (2015), LIT-118, read in NOTE-197 from the 2015 Durham working paper; the refereed version was not read. A conceptual proposal with one historical illustration, the 1950s smoking and lung cancer controversy, which the author says is not a test. What counts as relevant, and when to stop probing, is handed to context, and the four grades of warrant are admitted to be arbitrary. | Proposed |
| THEORY-541 | A model of discovery or analogy that is given representations built with the answer in view has been given most of the answer, as BACON was with Kepler’s data and SME with its solar system and atom, and representation-building cannot be postponed to a separate module, because which representation is right depends on the task and on the analogy being made | Chalmers, French & Hofstadter (1992), LIT-414, read in NOTE-359 from the preprint, with Burns’s review of Fluid Concepts (1995), LIT-457, read in NOTE-375. The BACON critique is strong; the SME critique moderate, with no alternative encoding run; the two arguments against a representation module informal. Burns turns the charges on Copycat: its Slipnet holds the domain’s relevant relations, and the symbol-grounding objection to SME applies to it equally. Nothing is measured in either text. | Proposed |
| THEORY-550 | Unsupervised clustering is not made epistemically superior to supervised classification by the absence of labels: it is sensitive to sample bias, highly sensitive to how inputs are represented, and overfits, with the number of clusters acting as a capacity control just as parametric complexity does in supervised learning | Søgaard (2024), LIT-162, read in NOTE-108. A rebuttal of two arguments for clustering’s superiority, the No-Bias Argument and the Simplicity-Truth Argument, by toy counterexample and by the technical literature on overfitting in unsupervised learning (Hansen & Larsen 1996). The negative claims are firm. The paper’s positive step, that supervised classification is “at least as” justified, is under-argued and is not part of this account. | Active |
| 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-569 | Measured as the contrast between a set of explanantia’s CohOG+ coherence with the explanandum and with its negation, explanatory power satisfies Roche and Sober’s Two Likelihood Inequalities for single hypotheses and fails the One, and in one causal chain and one collider it ranks the richer set above the sparser over a range of priors, where no two-place TLI measure can rank a conjunction so | Hartmann & Trpin (2026), LIT-165, read in NOTE-168, which recomputed all three numerical claims. One theorem (TLI for singleton explanans sets), one counterexample (OLI fails) and two parameterised existence examples (a distal cause for P(H1) < .7; a negatively interacting cause for P(H1) = P(H2) < .75). The escape from Roche & Sober is representational: a set is scored differently from the conjunction, and the two-place theorems still hold for conjunctions. No characterisation says when the richer set wins, and the paper’s claim that the measure “accommodates key scientific judgments” is more than the body shows. | Active |
| THEORY-572 | Where an effect is not yet well conceptualised, replication cannot say which effect exists: direct replication bears on random error, conceptual replication presupposes that two operationalisations pick out the same effect, and an effect is delineated instead by probing for systematic error | Feest (2019), LIT-161, read in NOTE-196 from the PSA 2018 manuscript; the version of record was not read. An informal argument with one historical case, the Mozart effect, declared “typical” without further evidence. The claim that direct replication says “nothing” about systematic error is overstated: multi-lab replications vary some tacit lab-level factors. The conclusion is scoped by the author to effects not yet well conceptualised, and to internal validity; the title and abstract drop that hedge. | Proposed |
| THEORY-586 | The ψ-ontology theorems exclude only overlap of the distributions that distinct quantum states induce over ontic states; overlap is sufficient but not necessary for reading ψ as knowledge, so a model in which the state is ψ-ontic in Harrigan and Spekkens’ sense can still have ψ represent partial knowledge | Hance, Rarity & Ladyman (2021), LIT-090, read in full in NOTE-072. The formal ψ-ontic/ψ-epistemic split is contradictory by stipulation, while the informal “ontic” and “epistemic” are not exclusive. So PBR and the related theorems bound the geometry of µ_ψ, not the interpretation of ψ. The paper proves nothing; its positive criterion (Eq. 6) is predictive incompleteness, and its Appendix A makes claims the record’s readings contradict. The defensible paraphrase of PBR is “not ψ-epistemic in the overlap sense, given preparation independence”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-591 | Cognition has two necessary marks, involving non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal processing, and as a contingent fact only processes in the brain have both, so notebooks, screens and tools coupled to a thinker are not parts of cognition, and human-plus-tool systems will support no science of their own | Adams & Aizawa (2001), LIT-438, read in NOTE-368, restated against Clark in 2010, LIT-455, read in NOTE-380 from a draft. Both marks are assumed: the first on a claimed consensus, the second on how mature sciences individuate kinds. The authors grant the parity principle and that cognition could extend; the claim is that it does not. The “no science of tool use” half is offered as a bet. Rupert, the other critic, rejects the derived-content argument as question-begging. | 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-600 | A definition of health and disease by social justice alone cannot fix what counts as disease: with justice left undefined, a majority with other values could medicalise what the definition was meant to protect, and unless medicine is fixed from outside, the category drifts until health becomes justice | Veit (2025), LIT-098, read in NOTE-097 from the PhilSci-Archive preprint. The target is Kukla’s institutional definition: a condition is a health condition iff medicalising it would be best for collective wellbeing. The argument is informal and has two horns. One is a thought experiment (p. 14). The other rests on an asserted, undocumented premise about how medical tools evolve (p. 15). The extension from Kukla to “any purely normativist account” is asserted, not shown case by case. Veit concedes the first horn bites only without moral consensus. | Proposed |
| THEORY-604 v2 | Most mathematical dualities are adjunctions between one category and the opposite of another, which become dual equivalences on their fixed points; what makes them dualities rather than equivalences is the reversal of arrows, so many of the ‘dualities’ physicists name are, in the mathematician’s sense, equivalences or symmetries | Corfield (2017), LIT-115, read in NOTE-141. A short programmatic paper. That most dualities of interest are covered by constructions around adjunction is shown by worked exposition of standard cases, not proved. There is unlikely to be “a single monolithic account” (pp. 59–60). Reserving “duality” for structural reversal is a stated preference, and the verdicts on string dualities are a paragraph each. The proposal that philosophers of physics need homotopy type theory is an expectation. | Proposed |
| 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-627 | A nudge discovered by a learning system, unlike one a person designed, comes with no prior theory of why it works and may exploit a cognitive process no theory yet describes, so judging it by its outcomes cannot diagnose or repair its side effects; overseeing it needs inspection of which human processes it exploits, by people expert in human cognition | Schmauder et al. (2023), LIT-179, read in NOTE-171. An argument by analogy from Hausman’s reply to Friedman: a test drive is not enough if you must repair the car. Its evidence is reported from others: an RL agent moved choices of a target lottery from 50% to 70% by exploiting documented biases (Dezfouli et al. 2020), and AI advisers learned dishonest advice against simulated clients. No case of an undocumented bias is given; that is the paper’s conjecture, and its oversight proposal is unspecified. | 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-637 | Treating openness in science as the unlimited sharing of research objects, with transparency ranked before reproducibility and inclusion, can narrow the epistemic diversity of research and entrench epistemic injustice, and this lowers the reliability of what is learned, so sharing is neither a necessary starting point nor a sufficient condition for reliable open science | Leonelli (2023), LIT-189, read in NOTE-098. An openly normative argument from four illustrative cases (GISAID, software stigma, crop-data linkage, the reproducibility debate) and the author’s earlier qualitative work. That sharing-first open science can reduce diversity and worsen injustice is moderately supported; that this degrades reliability is argued, not measured. The positive proposal, openness as judicious connection, gives no decision rule, and the critique targets an ideal type the author admits many initiatives do not fit. | Proposed |
| THEORY-639 | Inductive risk arises not only when a hypothesis is accepted but in choosing a significance level, in characterising data and in interpreting results: in the dioxin cancer studies each of these choices traded false positives against false negatives, three panels scored the same rat-liver slides differently, and threshold and no-threshold readings of the same data underlie regulatory limits about 100 times apart | Douglas (2000), LIT-139, read in NOTE-145. Three worked cases from one domain, dioxin toxicology and its regulation, on secondary data (EPA 1994; Kociba et al. 1978; Goodman & Sauer 1992). The structural point and the variation in slide scoring are strongly supported. The 100-fold figure is cited from Finkel (1988) and Greenlee et al. (1991). This is the descriptive half of the paper; the claim that values are therefore required is THEORY-442. | Active |
| THEORY-640 | Measured as mutual 10-nearest-neighbour overlap, competent vision models agree more with one another and better language models agree more with vision models, but the cross-modal score reaches only 0.16 of a possible 1, is the maximum over all layer pairs, and was adopted after a global kernel metric showed only a very weak trend | Huh, Cheung, Wang & Isola (2024), LIT-302, read in NOTE-286. Across 78 vision models, those solving more VTAB tasks agree more in mutual k-nearest-neighbour structure; language models with lower bits-per-byte agree more with vision models on 1,024 image–caption pairs. The cross-modal score “only reaches 0.16” of 1, is maximised over layer pairs, and the metric was chosen after CKA “revealed a very weak trend”. It is local neighbourhood agreement that rises with competence, not kernel equality and not convergence to a model of reality. | Active |
| THEORY-648 | A social fact is a way of acting, thinking or feeling that exists outside individual consciousness and can constrain the individual from outside, shown by sanction or by the resistance it offers to violation; such a fact is general in a group because it is collective, not collective because general, so the group is its substrate | Durkheim (1894; book 1895), chapter I of Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, LIT-484, read in French in NOTE-391. A definition argued from examples, which its author calls “un simple résumé des données immédiates de l’observation” (n. 3). Its two load-bearing steps are asserted: that what is neither organic nor individual-psychic must have society as its substrate, and that constraint is present even where no one feels it. It is a claim about the object of sociology, not a group-mind thesis. | Proposed |
| THEORY-657 | If an emergent property is one that the parts lack, then the other marks commonly given for emergence are separate questions about each system and not consequences of it: established condensed-matter cases show novelty without a discontinuity, a discontinuity without novelty, novelty that was predicted first, and novelty with a rigorous reduction | McKenzie (2025), LIT-141, read in full in NOTE-124. The book stipulates novelty as the definition and runs twelve further characteristics over about thirty cases. The Kondo effect is novel and continuous; the liquid–gas transition is discontinuous and adiabatically connected; BKT and the hexatic phase were predicted before they were found; Butterfield’s cases are novel and reduced. NOTE-124 says no THEORY follows from the book as a whole, since its definition is stipulated and the logical relations among the characteristics are left open by its own account (§24). This is the part of it that the counterexamples carry. | Proposed |
| THEORY-658 | Whether an account of organismal goal-directedness must separate genuine teleology from mere self-organisation, such as a candle flame, depends on what the account is for: a scientific model of agency need not and perhaps cannot draw the line, while an account of how mind and value fit into nature may have to, and need not be operationalisable | Nahas & Sachs (2023), LIT-192, read in NOTE-094 from the accepted manuscript. A metatheoretical argument: naturalising teleology serves at least two relatively autonomous projects, advancing biology and settling the naturalism debate, with different success criteria. It is worked on one dispute, the demarcation from dissipative structures. The positive pluralism (Deacon for naturalism, Walsh and the organisational approach for biology) is only “tempting to suggest”, and the boundary between the projects is never drawn. | 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-673 v2 | The Price equation follows from any ancestor–descendant mapping in a closed population and is, like f = ma, a generalization-sketch: a schema that is empty of predictions until a specific model supplies entities, characters, time step and causes, whose value lies in unifying and guiding model construction, so the charges that it is a tautology or lacks predictive power and dynamic sufficiency ask of it what only its specialisations can supply | Luque (2016), LIT-205, read in NOTE-101 from the PhilSci manuscript. The derivation and the diallelic re-derivation are strong; the generalization-sketch reading is a moderate argument by analogy with f = ma plus two case studies, whose authors recovered results already derivable otherwise. The reply to “tautology” answers the word, not the critics’ point, which Luque concedes in §7.2. The paper’s prescription, that biologists should adopt the equation, is asserted without comparison. | Proposed |
| THEORY-674 v2 | In Garg and Fetzer’s GPT-4o-mini extraction from NBER and CEPR working papers, edges kept in at least 4 of 9 passes and never checked against human labels, the mean per-paper share of edges labelled as backed by difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, an RCT, regression discontinuity or synthetic control rose from 7.7% in 1990 to 31.7% in 2020, at every overlap threshold; the paper’s per-decade slope fell from +0.0187 to +0.0011 once method mix and graph volume were controlled | Garg & Fetzer (2024; arXiv v2 2026), LIT-079, read in full in NOTE-083. GPT-4o-mini, nine passes per paper over the first 30 pages of 44,852 working papers, edges kept in at least 4 of 9 passes. The direction of the trend holds across overlap thresholds, its level does not (mean causal share 0.152 at EO = 1, 0.270 at EO = 9), and it nearly vanishes once method mix and graph volume are controlled. Validation covers paper-level method labels only, with RCT precision about 0.02. The association of causal structure with top-five publication rests on year-fixed-effect regressions over different subsamples and is not part of this claim. Promoted 2026-10-20 on the measurement alone (ADR-047 v3); the economics claim is held as THEORY-824. | Active |
| 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-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-802 v2 | In trained networks as in constructed ones, interchange interventions on a fixed set of variables can be satisfied equally by alignments related by a change of basis, so which internal direction mediates a high-level variable is fixed only relative to a chosen decomposition into units, and complex models will generally have several distinct, fully correct abstractions | The general reading that THEORY-243 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the three-unit network it proves (batch 062). Wu et al. (2024), LIT-961, conjecture that complex models have “multiple distinct fully correct abstractions” and that the causal-abstraction framework cannot settle structural equivalence; Makelov et al. (2023), LIT-968, §8, grant that crossing component boundaries makes “illusory” tenuous, and answer by privileging components. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. Its only support is the constructed tie. | Proposed |
| THEORY-814 | In scientific communities that settle on a consensus model by sound model comparisons, high reproducibility of results is not evidence that the consensus is true, because which alternatives get proposed can hold a false consensus whose results reproduce almost perfectly | The general reading that THEORY-295 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the memoryless consensus model it proves. Devezer, Nardin, Baumgaertner and Buzbas (2019), LIT-988, read in NOTE-792, present the decoupling of reproducibility from truth as a lesson for science, not only for their model. Their model has no beliefs, no learning and no memory in the consensus. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-824 | Economics working papers increasingly back their claims with design-based identification: in NBER and CEPR working papers the share of claims supported by difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, an RCT, regression discontinuity or synthetic control rose about fourfold from 1990 to 2020 | Garg and Fetzer (2024; arXiv v2 2026), LIT-079, read in full in NOTE-083, read the rise in their extraction’s design-backed share as a change in economics: “economic papers have increasingly incorporated causal inference methods to substantiate their claims over the past three decades”. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-674, only the extraction’s series, whose edges were never checked against human labels and whose per-decade slope nearly vanishes with method-mix and graph-volume controls. This is the paper’s reading, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-855 | In Bala–Goyal network models of unbiased scientists testing a slightly better new action, a propagandist who forwards to Bayesian policy makers only those real results that favour the worse action can leave the policy makers near-certain of the false theory while the scientists converge on the true one; the effect weakens as the policy makers hear more scientists, as the better action’s advantage grows and as each study gets larger | Weatherall, O’Connor and Bruner (2020; arXiv 2018), LIT-1341, read in NOTE-1038. No result is fabricated and no scientist is biased; the audience is misled because it updates on a selected sample as if it were not selected. It is a property of a stylized model, which the authors call “how-potentially”; it does not show that any real audience was misled this way, nor that an audience aware of the selection would be. | Active |
| THEORY-953 v2 | On Isaac’s structuralist account, the strongest evidence that a quality-space model targets phenomenal experience, and not only behaviour or neural activity, is convergence between models of the same space derived through different behavioural procedures, since experience is what those procedures share; he concedes that the convergence observed is coarse, with discrepancies that in many cases exceed each method’s own uncertainty, and that because the models average over subjects what they converge on is a standard observer | Isaac (2025), LIT-1361, read in NOTE-1163: why a third-personal science of quality spaces counts as a science of experience. Relations between experiences, unlike bare qualities, show up in behaviour, so they can be compared across subjects; and models from different behavioural routes that converge are taken to target what the routes share. The argument does not exclude a shared stimulus geometry or a shared decision process as the common factor, the convergence is partial by the paper’s own account, and averaging over subjects makes the target an ideal observer, which the paper leaves as an open puzzle. | Active |
| THEORY-1076 | For Bohr a phenomenon is the observation obtained under a specified experimental arrangement, epistemic and derivative, with atomic object and instrument presupposed real; his relational holism is epistemic, and the subject–object, knower–known and word–world dualisms are presupposed by his account, so Bohr’s authority does not support agential realism | Faye & Jaksland (2021), LIT-1672, read in NOTE-1220, from Bohr’s writings and the secondary literature. Active as exegesis: Bohr’s own definitions of “phenomenon” (1938, 1949) and the convergence of realist and antirealist readings that Bohr never denied atomic objects. The dualisms half is interpretive and weaker. It does not say that Barad’s view is false, only that it is not Bohr’s. | Active |
| THEORY-1078 | Constructor theory puts constraint in two places: a principle is a law that constrains other laws and is tested through its rivals, and a constructor is a physical thing that keeps its ability to cause a transformation; a task is possible when the laws set no limit, short of perfection, on how well it could be performed and that ability retained, so possibility needs no actual constructor, and constructor-theoretic statements mention none | Deutsch & Marletto (2015), LIT-1663, §§1–2 and footnote 1, read in NOTE-1219. Active as a reading of the paper’s definitions, which are explicit. It bears on A11’s remark that constructor theory “could sharpen” what the record means by “a constraint being real”, and it splits that notion. A possibility is a fact about the laws, which no particular thing realizes; a constructor is realized, approximate and deteriorating. It does not say that the framework’s basic principle I is true, nor that a law of possibility is, or is not, a constraint realized by something (CLAIM-477). | 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-1097 | A Markov blanket, in any formulation including sparse coupling at nonequilibrium steady state and time-varying blanket states, does not individuate a system: where it falls is fixed by modelling choices made before it is found, so it presupposes the boundary it is used to find, and it cannot represent a boundary the system produces | The wider claim dropped when THEORY-073 was narrowed to Friston’s 2013 formulation and promoted on 2026-10-27 (ADR-047 v4: a narrowing’s dropped claims go to Proposed entries). Both critiques argue the general form, and the record holds neither of the later formulations it would have to reach. Its promote_when is THEORY-073’s own, moved here unchanged. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1174 | Industry can bias a scientific community toward a worse treatment without corrupting any individual, by selectively funding researchers whose methods already favour its product, provided researchers differ in method and both influence and the training of newcomers follow productivity; an independent funder that discounts industry-funded work counteracts this, and one that funds on productivity alone makes it worse | The wide form THEORY-146 held before the eleventh status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-146, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s “counteracts this only if it discounts” is restated as “that discounts … counteracts this”: the paper compares two funder policies and asserts no necessity, a mis-statement left with THEORY-146’s note. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1204 | The strongest evidence that a quality-space model targets phenomenal experience, and not only behaviour or neural activity, is convergence between models of the same space derived through different behavioural procedures, since experience is what those procedures share | Isaac’s “own considered view” (2025), LIT-1361, §5, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-953 and promoted it as a report (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The argument does not rule out a shared stimulus geometry or a shared response process as the common factor, and the convergence is partial by the paper’s own account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1251 | Mossio, Montévil and Longo take organization, as closure of constraints, to be a theoretical principle of biology, posited a priori as physics posits its phase space and defining the domain together with variation, so that every system meeting both is biological by definition and organisms are one class of such systems; on this reading “organisms are organized” is constitutive, not an empirical finding, and the principle is to be judged by what it makes intelligible | Mossio, Montévil and Longo (2016), LIT-1888, §§1 and 4, read in NOTE-1461; the definitions are Montévil and Mossio’s (LIT-582, TERM-070). The paper states the principle’s status and scope and supports it by history and analogy; it derives nothing from it here. Proposed: what the principle buys is untested in this paper. It does not say that closure is observed in every organism, nor that only organisms realize it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1260 | Richens et al.’s sense of “an agent contains a world model” is that the transition function can be computed from the agent’s goal-conditioned input-output map, uniquely to within the theorem’s error, so the attribution is not a stance an observer may withhold, unlike a representation-theorem fit; but it holds of every implementation of the same map, a lookup table included, and so cannot show that a predictive component is realized inside the agent | Richens, Abel, Bellot and Everitt (2025), LIT-1891, read in NOTE-1469. The paper says its recovery map is “from the agent’s policy rather than its activations”, that this is “strictly weaker”, and that it shows “a world model encoded in the agent’s policy, not its specific use”; it contrasts itself with Savage, whose fit exists even for a random policy. That the result applies to Block’s lookup table (LIT-642) is immediate from Def. 5, which constrains only the map. Active: the paper’s own statements plus a one-line corollary. It does not say whether a compact implementation must have a separable predictive part. | Active |
| THEORY-1281 | Montréal School CCO’s commitment to interaction as the basis of organizing makes conversation analysis its method of choice, and that commitment keeps ventriloquism from serving as an open metamodel for communication theory | Wilhoit (2016), LIT-1923, read in NOTE-1487. An argument about method in a five-page reply to Cooren. It is not a claim that ventriloquial analyses entify agents, which is what Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902, pp. 1363–1364) cite it for. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1287 | The experiments mechanists use to find a mechanism’s components (correlation, lesion, stimulation, and intervening on the whole while recording the parts) run in both directions between part and whole and, by Craver and Bechtel’s own account, show only prima facie that an item is a component, because an item not interactively integrated into the system could be a background condition; they give no test of integration, so the experiments do not by themselves fix where a mechanism ends | Craver and Bechtel (2007), LIT-1928, pp. 553–554, read in NOTE-1491. The four kinds of interlevel experiment “share a form with Mill’s methods” and are symmetrical. A lesion deficit is “only prima facie” evidence of componency, since a part “not interactively integrated” may be a background condition (n. 10). “Integrated” is never defined, and nothing in the four experiments tests where the system’s edge is. That leaves the mechanism’s boundary to be fixed some other way. | Active |
| THEORY-1288 | If a mechanism’s behaviour supervenes on its constituents’ behaviours and constitution is not causal, every cause of that behaviour is also a cause of some constituent along another path, so no intervention can change the whole without separately changing a part; mutual manipulability by ideal interventions is then unsatisfiable, and once interventions are relaxed to admit these common causes, every model with constitutive dependence has a model without it that implies the same correlations under every manipulation, even in ideal experimental conditions | Baumgartner & Gebharter (2016), LIT-1934, pp. 10–13, 18–20, and Baumgartner & Casini (2017), LIT-1939, pp. 6–11; restated by Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel (2020) as Systematic Fat-Handedness. Read in NOTE-1493 and NOTE-1490. Active as a conditional: valid on supervenience and non-causal constitution, and checked step by step. It does not say that constitution cannot be known, only that no finite set of manipulations of whole and part shows it; and it is about simultaneous whole–part dependence, not about a diachronic cause inside a system, which can be intervened on surgically. | Active |
| THEORY-1289 | In a dynamical model anchored to an identified mechanism, holding one part’s variable fixed and finding that the phenomenon persists indicates that the part is not a component of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon, as when Smolen et al. fixed CLOCK and circadian oscillation continued; the verdict is relative to the phenomenon and only as good as the model, and it decides which pathways the phenomenon needs, not which lie inside the system | Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2010), LIT-1936, contribution C3 (p. 326), read in NOTE-1492. Smolen et al. (2001) fixed the concentration of CLOCK in a reduced model of the Drosophila clock, and oscillation continued. They concluded that the positive CLOCK loop “was not critical”. That is a part that belongs to the system and not to “the responsible mechanism for that particular phenomenon”. The clamp is an ideal intervention, cheap in a model and hard in vivo. It is not a test of where the system’s boundary lies. | Active |
| THEORY-1290 | A dynamical model whose variables are properties of parts and operations already identified by experiment explores the dynamics of that mechanism, while one that posits its parts de novo and is checked only by fit to behaviour shows at most how a mechanism of that kind could produce the behaviour; fit can rule such models out but usually cannot decide between competing architectures that each fit, and what decides is independent evidence about the parts | Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2010), LIT-1936, read in NOTE-1492. Circadian models came after the clock’s parts were found in the laboratory, and they explore those parts’ dynamics. Cognitive models posit their parts. “Empirical evidence can rule out specific models, but usually cannot decide between competing architectures” (p. 332). It does not say de novo models are worthless: they make the same six kinds of contribution, at weaker standing. Nor does it say that anchoring makes a model right. | Active |
| THEORY-1291 | Within levels of mechanisms, apparent top-down and bottom-up causes can be read as mechanistically mediated effects, intralevel causation among components together with the constitution of the whole by them, so that the relation between levels is constitution and not causation; Craver and Bechtel show the translation for six cases, on the assumption, not argued, that every higher-level cause has a mechanistic explanation | Craver and Bechtel (2007), LIT-1928, read in NOTE-1491. Parts and wholes are not distinct events. So, given transmission, distinctness or asymmetry views of causation, they cannot be cause and effect, and the symmetry of interlevel experiments is explained by constitution. The six worked cases translate. The account says nothing about whether a feedback loop crossing the mechanism’s boundary changes the analysis, and its generality is assumed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1293 | Given that every change in a phenomenon is simultaneously realized by some constituent on every lower level, that simultaneous changes are not causally related, that co-occurrence is transitive, and that the parts and their levels are already known, a single intervention that changes a part and the phenomenon simultaneously while directly changing at most one behaviour on each lower level shows that the part is a constituent; the condition presupposes the boundary and the level hierarchy it is applied to and cannot supply them | Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel (2020), LIT-1924, §§3–4, read in NOTE-1494. Active as a conditional: the eight-line reductio is valid on Universal Constitution, Simultaneity and transitivity of co-occurrence, and checked. It does not say such interventions exist in any real system, that the condition is necessary, or where the boundary lies; and its line between causation and constitution is simultaneity, which is sharp only at a fixed time resolution. | Active |
| THEORY-1294 | Constitution is best inferred, and only abductively, from the failure to break a coupling: a set of parts constitutes a phenomenon when every cause of the phenomenon is also a cause of some member of the set, no smaller set does as much, and no expansion of the variables studied turns up a cause of the phenomenon that spares them all, so constitutive relevance is fixed by the set a part belongs to and no finite series of experiments settles it | Baumgartner & Casini (2017), LIT-1939, §§4–5, their No De-Coupling account, developing the fat-handedness criterion of Baumgartner & Gebharter (2016), LIT-1934, pp. 20–22. Read in NOTE-1490 and NOTE-1493. Proposed: a definition offered with no operationalization and no case from practice, which the authors say themselves. It does not say how far a variable set must be expanded, and it takes parthood as given. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1306 | In hierarchically organized systems, levels are demarcated by sharp discontinuities in characteristic process and relaxation rates, the embedding level being slower than its components, and a level controls another by constraint only while their rates stay separated: when the cycling rates converge, the control asymmetry and the distinction between the levels are lost, whatever the signal amplitude; Juarrero’s statement of Salthe’s and Allen and Starr’s hierarchy theory | Juarrero (2023), LIT-1995, ch. 12 (pp. 183–191) with ch. 6 (pp. 68, 72, 77), read in NOTE-1532. A philosophical statement of hierarchy theory, quoting Salthe 1985 and Allen, O’Neill and Hoekstra 1984, with examples from academic administration and tumours; no model. Proposed: the rate-demarcation of levels is the hierarchy theorists’, and the loss of control when rates converge is asserted, not shown. It is the closest prior art the record holds for CLAIM-478. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1332 | In Bishop’s account, chaos is a property of deterministic dynamics, so sensitive dependence is not indeterminism; under determinism it may model deliberation but is not sufficient for incompatibilist freedom, and under indeterminism the incompatibilist (Kane) must still show that agents can harness amplified indeterminism; and amplification itself may fail, since damping, the sign of the local Lyapunov exponents when a perturbation arrives, and the brain’s parallel redundancy limit it | Bishop, SEP “Chaos” (2008; revision of 2024-10-11), LIT-1961, §§4, 6.1 and 6.4, read in NOTE-1535. Active as a statement of the entry’s position, checked verbatim, and its §4 dynamics is elementary. The sharp edge: the brain-redundancy point is asserted without evidence, and the entry does not argue that harnessing is impossible, only that it has not been shown. | Active |
| 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 |
| THEORY-1335 | In Juarrero’s constraint account, context-independent constraints take conditions away from equiprobability and context-dependent ones away from independence (after Gatlin); enabling constraints couple separate processes into a coherent dynamic whose constitutive constraints then act top down as second-order governing constraints that confine its components to a subregion of state space; a constraint is defined as what raises or lowers barriers to energy flow without transferring kinetic energy, carries no time-scale condition, and the governing regime is held not to be other than the components | Juarrero (2023), LIT-1995, read in NOTE-1532 (Skimmed; chapters 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15 and 16 in full). Active as a statement of what the account is: its kinds of constraint, its definition, and its top-down step, all stated in the text (pp. 25, 40, 67, 71, 79–84). It does not say that the account is true, that constraints transfer no energy, or that her constraint is the record’s (TERM-070’s). | Active |