Why it is a question
THEORY-161 now holds for Zhao et al. and Chai et al.: in each, a source emits pairs (S, X) with a joint law known to the designer, and the theorems are indirect source-coding results that use nothing about S beyond that law and the distortion. The record knows Liu, Zhang and Poor’s framework (ISIT 2021; IEEE Trans. Commun. 2022) only through Xin, Fan and Letaief’s survey, and has read no framework by other groups. So whether the field as a whole has this form is unsettled.
What would answer it
A reading of Liu, Zhang and Poor’s papers, and of one further semantic rate–distortion framework by other authors, each found to treat meaning as a latent variable with a known joint law with the observation, coded through the observation, would answer it yes. A framework whose limit changes when S is given logical, compositional or contextual structure, with the joint law and the distortion held fixed, would answer it no. Agreement among papers by the same groups does not count.