Supplier Concentration Risk

Exposure that arises when a buyer's dependency for a critical input rests on so few suppliers that one node's disruption propagates downstream faster than alternatives can be qualified — a shape property of the dependency distribution, not of any supplier's performance.


Supply

Model producer behavior as a whole price-to-quantity schedule rather than a single quantity, upward-sloping because expanding output raises marginal cost, so any disturbance either moves output along the curve (only the good's own price) or shifts the whole curve (everything else).


Supporting Effort

Tag a concurrent military activity as subordinate to the main effort so that, under scarcity, support and command attention flow to the decisive operation first and the supporting activity yields by design rather than neglect.


Surrogate Endpoint Problem

The failure that arises when a trial's biomarker surrogate diverges from the clinical endpoint it stands in for — because the intervention acts through off-pathway mechanisms the surrogate cannot see — so individual-level correlation does not license an intervention-level claim.


Surrogation

Explain why a well-designed metric drifts from its purpose even absent any gaming: under load an accountable manager mentally replaces the strategic construct with its measure, treating the number as the thing itself rather than a partial proxy for it.


Symplectic Structure

Equip an even-dimensional manifold with a non-degenerate, closed 2-form ω that pairs each position with its conjugate momentum, so any smooth function becomes a flow and every such flow preserves ω exactly — forcing the Poisson bracket, Liouville's theorem, and the canonical-transformation test as consequences.


Synaptic Plasticity

The capacity of individual synapses to undergo lasting changes in transmission efficacy driven by their joint activity history, giving memory a physical address as a modifiable weight distribution and organizing a family of mechanisms along direction, timescale, polarity, modality, and gating.


Synaptic Pruning

During nervous-system development and plasticity, activity and molecular tagging selectively eliminate weaker or inappropriate synapses, refining exuberant early connectivity into efficient, experience-shaped circuits.


Syncopation

Place emphasis on metric positions where the listener does not expect it, against a maintained regular pulse, so the displacement registers as propulsion only because a felt grid stays put for the played accents to lean against.


Synthetic Media Laundering

The information-ecosystem failure in which algorithmically generated content enters an evidence channel past an unscrutinized intake node and is progressively washed through authenticating intermediaries until downstream consumers treat it as verified-provenance reality.


Tactical Urbanism

Install a low-cost, short-duration, explicitly reversible version of a proposed public-space change so the demonstration both generates before-and-after evidence and lowers the political stakes of committing — feeding a commit-or-remove decision.


Tamagotchi Effect

Explain why people form real emotional attachment to artificial entities they know aren't alive: a care-requesting cue bundle plus a recurring maintenance demand engages the human caregiving instinct, producing attachment disproportionate to the object's realism.


Target Fixation

The acute failure in which pursuit of a salient local objective consumes a fixed attentional capacity so completely that the strategic envelope goes unmonitored — worsening with operator skill, and fixable only by externalising the monitor, never by exhorting the engager.


Task-Switching Cost

Isolate the performance penalty paid at the moment of changing between rule-sets — separate from either task's steady-state difficulty — by contrasting switch trials against repeat trials in the same mixed block, and split it into a preparation-reducible part and an irreducible residual.


Technology Push

The innovation posture in which a technical capability is developed first and a search for problems it can address follows — the inverse of demand pull, fixing the technology and ranging over problem spaces, with the multi-year match step as the load-bearing risk.


Telescoping Effect

Distort the felt timing of remembered events because memory stores no timestamps and reconstructs a date from retrieval-cue richness — so vivid, salient events feel more recent than they were (forward telescoping) and monotonous stretches feel more distant.


Tempering

Reheat a hardened, brittle quenched steel to a sub-critical temperature for a controlled time so carbon diffuses into fine carbides, trading a few hardness points for the toughness the quench alone cannot deliver — a chosen point on the hardness-toughness curve.


Temporal Binding

Bind events that fall within a characteristic time window into a single perceived unit by attributing them to a shared source, warping subjective time and location to keep the percept consistent with that attribution.


Temporal coverage

A metadata declaration that a resource is valid only within a stated time interval, published as an inclusion-exclusion rule on the time dimension so consumers can check at the catalog layer whether their question's period falls inside the window — and whether it has gone stale.


Temporal Distinctiveness

Predict an item's recallability not from its absolute age but from how isolated it is among its neighbours in a log-compressed, retrieval-end view of the past, governed by the ratio of the retention interval to the inter-item interval.


Temporary Field

The code smell in which an object carries an instance variable meaningful only during one operation or state yet visible as permanent structural state everywhere — a mismatch between the field's structural scope (every instance) and its validity scope (the subset where it holds a real value).


Tensor

A multilinear map over a vector space, represented in coordinates by an indexed array whose components co-vary contravariantly and covariantly under change of basis so the underlying geometric object stays invariant — the transformation law being what makes it a tensor rather than a mere array.


Ternary Form

The musical A–B–A pattern in which an opening section fixes a tonal identity, a contrasting middle departs from it, and a perceptible return restores it — a frame around contrast whose homecoming carries the weight of what B traversed.


Test-Turnaround Lag

Diagnose why a valid test still failed to help by comparing two clocks — how long the result takes to arrive against how long the decision can wait — and reading the sign of the gap: when the result clock loses, the answer returns operationally inert.


Tetris Effect

The involuntary persistence of patterns from a recently, intensively practised activity into perception, imagery, and dreams — memory consolidation replaying strongly encoded content through a non-declarative pathway as a side-channel of skill learning.


Textual Definition

Attach to a term in a controlled vocabulary a stable natural-language statement of the conditions under which it is correctly applied, converting a privately-interpreted label into a publicly consultable boundary that serves as the appeal of last resort in annotation disputes.


Thatcher Effect

A face with locally inverted eyes and mouth looks grotesque upright but unremarkable upside down, because the holistic configural system that reads inter-feature relations fires only near canonical upright orientation — a switch that lets the effect probe whether that system is engaged and intact.


Thematic Analysis

Turn interpreting a qualitative corpus into an auditable procedure — a six-phase chain from familiarisation through coding to reviewed, named themes — plus declared axis-settings that together fix both what a theme means and how it is warranted.


Theme Reification

Diagnose the qualitative-analysis failure where an analyst-authored thematic label is treated as a real entity in the world — the grammatical subject migrating from 'I grouped these utterances' to 'participants have this need' — by testing whether provenance to specific quotations survives.


Therapeutic Duplication

The medication-safety failure where uncoordinated prescribers each place a defensible order that lands on the same pharmacologic target, so additive exposure overruns the therapeutic window — a harm that lives in the set of orders, not in any single one.


Thin Description

An ethnographic account that records the surface behaviour of an act but omits the contextual layers — participant meaning, social code, interpretive reasoning — a reader would need to recognise whether the act is the same kind of thing in a new setting, leaving the record true but analytically inert.


Third-Person Effect

Explain censorship and content-regulation demand by the gap between how strongly people think a media message affects others versus themselves, since it is that perceived self-other asymmetry, not the message's real influence, that drives the demand — and its sign flips with the message's valence.


Third Place

Name the category of semi-public gathering venue that is neither home nor work, and test whether a setting truly functions as one against eight characteristics — neutral ground, regulars, conversation over turnover — separating social function from mere built form.


Thought-Terminating Cliché

A stock verbal formula that closes an open inquiry not by answering it but by exploiting a social uptake norm that treats producing the formula as having discharged the obligation to reply.


Through-Composed Form

Classify a piece by what it refuses — no large-scale section ever returns — so it unfolds continuously through new material in one direction, cohered by throughline rather than by formal recurrence, meaningful only against a tradition where sectional return is the default.


Thrust Fault

A compressional fault on which the hanging wall rides up and over the footwall along a low-angle plane in response to horizontal crustal shortening, diagnosed by its inverted stratigraphic signature — older rocks resting on younger — the fingerprint of a block transported from greater depth or farther back in a shortened stack.


Tidal Mixing

The turbulent stirring of a stratified water column by tidal currents flowing over seafloor topography — governed by the Simpson-Hunter index h/u³, which lets the mixed / frontal / stratified regime be mapped in advance from bathymetry and a tidal-current atlas alone.


Timbre

The perceptual quality that distinguishes two sounds sharing the same pitch, loudness, and duration — the correlate of a sound's spectral and temporal envelope, varying orthogonally to the other acoustic dimensions.


Timing Risk

The failure mode where a technically sound product, technology, or policy fails not from its own defects but because the surrounding environment is not yet — or is no longer — ready to absorb it, treating environmental readiness as a risk factor independent of execution.


Tobin's q

The ratio of a firm's market value to the replacement cost of its physical assets, read against a threshold of one to signal whether capital should flow in (build) or out (divest) — because building beats buying only when the market prices assembled capital above the cost of reproducing it.


Tonality

Organize a musical system around one referential pitch — the tonic — so every note is heard not absolutely but as a position in a hierarchy of stability, with a codified grammar of directed pulls that encodes tension as distance from the center and resolution as return to it.


Topic Facet

Isolate what a resource is about as a single independently selectable axis in a faceted classification, so topical queries combine with place, time, and form filters at query time instead of being fused in advance into precoordinated compound headings.


Topoi

The pre-formed argument templates of rhetorical invention — a finite catalogue of move-forms (definition, a fortiori, cause-and-effect, sign, precedent) whose form is fixed and content variable — so finding arguments becomes an auditable search through a known library rather than creation ex nihilo.


Topological Sorting

Produce a linear order over the nodes of a directed acyclic graph so every edge runs forward — every dependency before its dependent — by repeatedly emitting any node with no unmet prerequisite, well-defined exactly when the graph has no cycle.


Topological Space

Capture the minimum data continuity needs by pairing a set with a collection of its subsets — the open sets, closed under arbitrary unions and finite intersections — so that continuity, compactness, and connectedness can be defined with no reference to distance.


Touch-Target Miss

Reclassify a mistyped tap from operator error to interface defect by reading the miss rate off the mismatch between a control's target geometry and the operator population's motor precision — a geometric scan Fitts's Law makes quantitative.


Touch Target Size

The HCI rule that interactive elements be large and well-spaced enough for the operating population's worst-case input precision to hit reliably — grounded in Fitts's Law and codified as platform minimums like 44pt or 48dp.


Toulmin Model

Decompose an informal argument into six named slots — claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal — so evaluation becomes a completeness check that isolates the usually-implicit warrant, where almost every contested dispute actually lives.


Transfer-Learning Attack

Vulnerabilities, backdoors, or poisoned representations baked into an upstream pretrained model ride intact into every downstream system built on it, because the downstream team's audit boundary encloses only its new layers while the attack surface spans the whole inherited substrate.


Transform Fault

Classify a plate boundary as the conservative one — where two plates slide horizontally past each other creating and consuming no crust — so that its slip is fixed entirely by plate relative motion, and read basins, ranges, quakes, and seafloor scars off termination, bend polarity, and segment length.


Transport Convergence Zone

A localized front or region where opposing or spatially converging transport velocities reduce net export and concentrate carried matter, so the zone persists or migrates with the field that creates the convergence.


Transshipment

Move cargo through intermediate transfer points where it changes vehicle or mode, and re-price the journey as a fixed handling charge per transfer plus linear haul cost — so total cost keys to the number of transfers, not the distance travelled.


Traveler's Dilemma

Isolate recursion depth as the variable governing whether an iterated-dominance equilibrium predicts behavior — using the same weak-dominance move as the Prisoner's Dilemma chained 98 times, so the $2 prediction evaporates while behavior tracks an incentive gradient the concept is blind to.


Tree (Data Structure)

The computer-science container for rooted, single-parent, acyclic hierarchies whose recursive type lets every algorithm decompose as act-at-the-root, recurse-on-each-subtree, combine — with operation cost governed by one quantity, the tree's height.


Tree (Graph Theory)

Characterize a connected acyclic graph — equivalently, one with a unique path between every pair of vertices, or exactly n−1 edges on n vertices — so that recognizing the structure by any one handle imports the bridge-everywhere, fundamental-cycle, and cheapest-connector consequences for free.


Trembling-Hand Perfect Equilibrium

Filter the Nash equilibria by giving every action a vanishing positive probability of being played by mistake and keeping only those that survive as the tremble shrinks to zero, discarding equilibria propped up by threats that never have to be carried out.


Trie

A tree of symbol-labelled edges storing a set of strings so that every root-to-node path spells a prefix and strings sharing a prefix share a path, answering prefix queries in time proportional to the query length alone, independent of how many strings are stored.


Triffin Dilemma

The structural bind in which a national currency serving as the world's reserve asset must run persistent deficits to supply global liquidity, yet those same deficits erode the confidence that makes the currency worth holding — two roles one issuer cannot jointly satisfy over time.


Trophic Subsidy

The cross-habitat flux in which production from a donor ecosystem sustains consumers in a recipient ecosystem above what its own productivity could support — creating a hidden dependence on, and vulnerability to, a remote donor the recipient never contacts.


Tu Quoque

Catch the fallacy of rebutting a charge by alleging the accuser commits the same offence — substituting a verdict on the speaker's standing for a verdict on the speaker's claim — by asking whether the dispute was about a proposition's truth or the speaker's standing.


Tullock Paradox

The puzzle that observed rent-seeking expenditures — lobbying fees, contributions, access payments — run far below the value of the rents they secure, read as a diagnostic signal that barriers to entry keep competition from dissipating the prize as the standard model predicts.


Turbidity Plume

A body of fluid carrying a detectable suspended load that advects with the carrier flow while dispersing at its margins and depositing material along its path — governed by an advection-dispersion equation with source and settling terms.


Turing Machine

The canonical formal model of computation — finite control plus an unbounded read-write tape governed by a finite transition function — whose one unbounded resource is the tape, and against which computability and complexity are given exact, provable meaning.


Two Generals' Problem

Prove that no finite exchange of messages can make two parties certain they agree when any single message might be lost, because the last message in any protocol is itself unacknowledged.


Two-Sided Message

A persuasive communication that explicitly concedes an opposing argument alongside its advocacy, purchasing credibility with a costly concession — an advantage that holds only when credibility is the bottleneck and the audience is skeptical or already aware of the counter-argument.


Two-Step Flow

Model media influence as travelling in two stages — from mass media to socially central opinion leaders, then from those leaders to followers through trusted interpersonal contact — treating the intermediary layer as a filter and amplifier, not a relay.


Type Inference

Algorithmically reconstruct the types of expressions from their usage context rather than from annotations, by generating an equality constraint at each syntactic form and solving them by unification to return either each expression's principal (most general) type or a genuine type error.


Type M Error

Quantify how much a significant effect's reported magnitude is exaggerated by the significance filter under low power, via the exaggeration ratio — the expected significant estimate divided by the true effect — computable from the design before any data exist.


Type S Error

Quantify the risk that a statistically significant estimate points the wrong way by computing, before data collection, the probability that a two-sided significance filter is cleared from the opposite tail when the true effect is near zero relative to noise.


Type System

A discipline that assigns every value and expression a type and uses that classification to constrain which operations may legally apply, verifying via compositional typing rules that well-typed programs cannot reach a wrong-kinded state (soundness).


Type-Token Ratio

Estimate a language sample's lexical diversity as distinct word types over total tokens, while correcting for the sample-size confound that makes vocabulary grow sublinearly and raw TTR fall with length.


Ultimatum Game

A two-player, one-shot bargaining test in which a proposer splits a fixed stake and a responder may accept or reject for nothing, isolating costly punishment of unfairness by pitting the selfish equilibrium against the offers and rejections people actually make.


Uncanny Valley

Human affinity for a human-like artefact does not rise steadily with realism but climbs, then plunges into a valley of unease in the narrow almost-human band, and recovers only when realism reads as genuinely human — because near-human stimuli recruit human-specific recognition routines that flag the remaining mismatches.


Underfitting

The failure mode where a model's hypothesis class is too restrictive to capture the structure genuinely present in the data — high bias, with training and test error both elevated and close together — curable only by a richer functional form, not by more data or regularization.


Unit-Economics Mirage

The error of judging a business viable from a rising aggregate metric — revenue, users, gross merchandise volume — while its fully-loaded per-unit economics are structurally negative, exposed by testing the contribution on the next unit rather than the average across existing ones.


Unity-of-Command Breakdown

The command-and-control failure in which one subordinate node in the authority graph carries two or more binding in-edges for the same task at the same time, so that when the supervisors' orders diverge the actor cannot comply with both.


Universal property

Define a mathematical object not by its internal construction but by the unique pattern of maps it sustains with every other object in a class — a commuting-diagram condition plus a unique-mediating-morphism clause that pins the object down up to unique isomorphism.


Unsafe Supervision

The HFACS stratum in which supervisory planning, correction, and rule- enforcement decisions transmit organizational conditions into the operator's immediate environment and thereby stage unsafe acts.


Uplift

The vertical raising of Earth's crust recast as a rate — the time derivative of rock or surface height — driven by one of four mechanically distinct forces and read as a balance among three quantities (surface uplift, rock uplift, exhumation) that can carry opposite signs at once.


Upwelling

The oceanographic cascade by which alongshore wind, deflected by the Coriolis force into offshore Ekman transport, opens a coastal mass deficit that draws cold nutrient-rich deep water up into the sunlit euphotic zone, firing the phytoplankton blooms that feed the world's most productive fisheries.


Urban Heat Island

Explain the persistent urban-rural temperature offset, especially after sunset, through heat-absorbing materials, thermal storage, reduced evapotranspiration and ventilation, canyon radiation trapping, and anthropogenic waste heat.


Urban Sprawl

The metropolitan growth pattern defined by a conjunction of four attributes — low density, single-use separation, car-dependent connectivity, and leapfrog geometry — that together make a settlement form diagnosable, measurable, and addressable by attribute-specific policy levers.


User Journey

Represent a person's experience of a service as an ordered sequence of touchpoints, annotated stage by stage with goals, actions, channels, and an emotional curve, so that friction hidden by aggregate scores becomes visible and attributable to a specific design decision.


Uses and Gratifications

Flip the media-effects question by treating the audience as an active selector who chooses content to meet a small typology of needs, and track whether the gratifications sought match those obtained to predict what people consume and whether they stay.


Validated Learning

Denominate an early-stage venture's progress in a single currency — behavioural evidence from real customers that moves a specific hypothesis — and gate every candidate sign of progress through an admissible-evidence filter that discounts activity, vanity metrics, and stated intentions.


Value Proposition

Articulate, in a structured object with named slots, what benefit an offering delivers for a specific customer segment under a specific constraint and why it beats named alternatives — a targeted, contrastive, capability-honest statement that serves as the shared referent for aligning product, pricing, marketing, and sales.


Vanity-Metric Addiction

A team locks onto a metric chosen for how impressive it looks rather than its causal link to the outcome, then keeps it after the disconnect is known because dropping it carries social cost.


Veblen Effect

The anomaly that, for status goods, demand rises with price rather than falling — because the conspicuous high price is itself the costly signal of the buyer's wealth, so cutting it destroys the signal and drives out the very buyers who constitute the market.


Velocity of money

The average number of times a unit of money changes hands in a period, computed as nominal spending over the money stock (V = PY/M), turning the equation of exchange into an accounting bridge from a money stock to a flow of spending — provided velocity itself holds steady.


Vendor-Managed Inventory

Shift four coupled properties — consumption data, replenishment authority, stock ownership, and risk — upstream from buyer to supplier as a single bundle, dampening the bullwhip effect at the cost of a principal-agent gap that governance metrics must close.


Ventriloquism Effect

A sound is mislocalised toward a synchronised visual event when the brain infers a common cause, because vision's lower spatial uncertainty pulls the merged location estimate toward it by inverse-variance weighting — gated by temporal and spatial binding windows beyond which the percept splits.


Venus Effect

Viewers of a depicted figure at a mirror wrongly infer she sees her own reflection, because they treat the mirror as returning one fixed image to everyone rather than reflecting along a viewer-dependent sight-line — so a self-regarding scene the geometry forbids is accepted without objection.


Verdoorn's Law

The empirical regularity that labour-productivity growth rises with output growth — a sustained one-point rise in manufacturing output growth adding roughly 0.5 points of productivity growth — so that fast output expansion endogenously induces productivity gains through learning, specialization, and capital deepening.


Version control

Track every change to a corpus of diff-amenable artefacts as atomic, authored, parent-pointed commits forming an append-only DAG, making history a first-class object over which branching, merging, reverting, blame, and bisect become routine graph queries.


Vickrey Auction

A sealed-bid auction where the highest bidder wins but pays the second-highest bid, decoupling what you win from what you pay so that bidding your true valuation is the dominant strategy — no rival-modeling needed — and the item reaches whoever values it most.


Visibility of System Status

Keep users out of the dark by making a system's hidden internal state externally legible through timely, appropriately calibrated feedback — enumerating every state a user's actions can induce and asking, for each, whether the user can see they are in it in time to choose a next action.


Voice

Treat the sound of speech as a laryngeal source signal produced by vibrating vocal folds and then filtered by the vocal tract, so a disordered voice can be localised to a production stage and its quality quantified by how far its glottal waveform departs from stable periodicity.


Volatility Smile

The pattern that an option's implied volatility varies systematically with strike and maturity rather than being the constant Black-Scholes assumes, tracing a curve whose shape is read as the fingerprint of the market's risk-neutral return distribution and its pricing of tail risk.


Volcanism

Explain how internally generated magma ascends and releases at a planetary surface by placing every eruption in a two-parameter space of silica (viscosity) and volatile content (explosivity), with melt generated by three solidus-crossing routes bound to tectonic setting.


Volta

The structural pivot in a lyric poem — codified at line 9 of a Petrarchan sonnet or line 13 of a Shakespearean one — where the argument or perspective turns and retroactively reframes everything that preceded it, rather than merely continuing it.


Volunteer-Management Overload

The crisis failure mode in which would-be helpers arrive faster than a response system's finite credential-brief-assign-supervise intake channel can absorb them, so beyond a threshold each marginal arrival consumes net capacity rather than adding it.


Volunteer's Dilemma

A game where a shared good is produced if any single member pays a private cost to provide it, so each prefers someone else volunteer — and, counterintuitively, larger groups grow no more (often less) likely to produce it.


Von Restorff Effect

An item that departs from the pattern of its surrounding context is recalled far more reliably than its neighbours, because memory is contrast-sensitive rather than absolute — the boost is a function of departure from the local norm, not of the item's intrinsic properties.


Wagner's Law

The empirical regularity that as a country industrializes and per-capita income rises, public expenditure grows faster than GDP so its share of national income climbs — driven by the compounding pull of administrative load, income-elastic demand for merit goods, and Baumol cost-disease.


Wagon-Wheel Effect

A rapidly spinning spoked wheel appears to slow, freeze, or reverse because a periodic feature sampled at discrete intervals above its Nyquist limit produces a lower-frequency alias — the apparent motion being the slowest rotation consistent with the snapshots, not the true speed.


Walkability

Score how well a built environment supports travel on foot by measuring two conjunctive halves — whether daily destinations sit within walking range and whether the paths between them are safe and continuous — so a low number points at the binding deficit.


Wallace Effect

The evolutionary process (reinforcement) by which natural selection actively strengthens prezygotic reproductive isolation at secondary contact, favouring any heritable trait that reduces cross-population mating whenever the hybrids between the diverging populations are less fit.


Warehouse Slotting Failure

Diagnose a chronically slow but findable warehouse as a layout misaligned with demand flow — fast SKUs stranded in high-access-cost positions — by checking whether the position-cost ordering and the SKU-velocity ordering have drifted apart.


Watchdog Journalism

Model the press as an independent, adversarial monitor of the powerful whose exposures route to voters, regulators, or courts the monitored actor does not control — so its capacity reads off four structural elements and fails through capture or chilling effect.


Water Mass

A body of ocean water identified not by its location but by a conservative temperature-salinity signature set at its formation region — so a sample drawn anywhere in the interior can be matched back to origin and read as a mixture of a few named source waters.


Watershed

Bound the space of contributing sources for any point in a river to the terrain-defined area draining to a common outlet, then exploit the asymmetric upstream-downstream coupling — everything propagates down, nothing back up against gravity — to fix search direction and intervention shape.


Wave Packet

Build a localised disturbance as a narrow-band superposition of plane waves so it has both a position and a spectrum, then read its centroid off the group velocity and its spreading off the curvature of the medium's dispersion relation.


Wave Picking

Release warehouse orders not on arrival but in timed, compatibility-grouped cohorts, deliberately accepting a bounded latency wait so that picking, packing, and loading run synchronously against the same wave and downstream stations stay neither starved nor overwhelmed.


Wavelet

A localized, oscillating template function whose scaled and translated copies form a basis that resolves a signal simultaneously in position and scale, producing a sparse two-dimensional coefficient plane where features localize in both axes at once — the precondition being a sampled signal with scale-localized, transient structure.


Wayfinding System

A designed network of environmental cues on a legible substrate that lets a goal-directed agent localise, choose a next step, and recover from disorientation — pushing navigation work out of the head into the environment.


Weber's Law

The just-noticeable difference in a stimulus is a constant fraction of the baseline magnitude, not a fixed absolute amount (ΔI/I = k), so a perceiving system compares ratios rather than differences across its dynamic range.


Well-Travelled Road Effect

People underestimate the duration of familiar routes and overestimate equally long unfamiliar ones, because retrospective duration is reconstructed from the count of distinct, attention-demanding event traces memory retained — few for automatic familiar travel, many for novel decision-dense travel.


Werther Effect

The measured rise in suicide rates in the weeks after a publicised suicide, driven by media-modelled behaviour and gated by how closely the at-risk audience identifies with the case, with a sign-flipped protective complement when coverage models recovery instead.


Westermarck Effect

The evolved incest-avoidance mechanism in which people raised in close domestic proximity during the first six years develop a lasting adult sexual aversion to one another — tracking early co-residence as a proxy for kinship, not biological relatedness itself.


Wettability

Summarise whether a liquid spreads across or beads off a solid into one measurable scalar — the contact angle set by adhesion versus cohesion — factored into surface chemistry and topography, with two discrete roughness regimes.


Wholesale-Funding Run

A rapid, self-reinforcing withdrawal of short-term funding by a small set of professional creditors who simultaneously refuse to roll over maturing liabilities — coordinated by shared information and driven by the first-mover advantage of a finite liquid-asset pool, draining a firm in days.


Word Frequency Effect

The robust finding that high-frequency words are recognised faster and more accurately than low-frequency ones, because lexical access is a graded, exposure-keyed threshold — retrieval speed falling roughly with the logarithm of a word's lifetime corpus frequency for that reader.


Word Superiority Effect

The finding that a target letter is identified faster and more accurately inside a familiar word than in a non-word or alone, because an activated lexical whole feeds activation back down to its constituent letters within the stimulus window.


Working Memory

Maintain a small, short-lived set of representations in an actively accessible workspace whose executive control can select, rehearse, transform, replace, and coordinate them for the task currently being performed.


Working Memory Capacity

The finite quantity of information a person can hold actively available for simultaneous manipulation — a small chunk-counted budget distinct from long-term and sensory memory — sized as supply against a task's demand, and attackable by chunking, offloading, or sequencing.


Working-Memory Updating

The executive function of monitoring a capacity-limited short-term store and revising its contents in real time — adding, replacing, transforming, and evicting items by relevance to the current task, distinct from passively maintaining them.


Worse-than-Average Effect

The reversal of self-enhancement on hard, expert-dominated tasks, where most people rate themselves below average because self-ratings anchor on one's own absolute perceived skill and ignore the distribution of others — the sign of the bias set by perceived task difficulty.


Wrong Direction (Reverse Causation Fallacy)

Catch the error of assigning a causal arrow A→B when it actually runs B→A on the strength of a symmetric association alone, by refusing any oriented claim until temporal precedence or interventional response fixes the direction.


Yerkes–Dodson Law

The finding that task performance improves with arousal up to an interior optimum then deteriorates — an inverted-U whose peak sits at lower arousal for complex tasks and higher for simple ones, so under- and over-arousal are opposite failures needing opposite fixes.


Zeigarnik Effect

The finding that interrupted or unfinished tasks are recalled better than completed ones, because beginning a task installs a persisting goal-tension that keeps its representation activated until completion discharges it — scaled by goal-importance and gated on the interruption reading as a pause.


Zero Lower Bound

The near-hard floor that stops a central bank cutting its nominal policy rate below zero — because savers can always hold cash yielding 0% — turning the exhaustion of the conventional rate lever into a regime change that forces unconventional easing tools.


Zoning

Partition a jurisdiction's territory into spatially bounded districts and assign each a fixed rule bundle of permitted, conditional, and prohibited uses plus dimensional standards, so what may be built at any parcel resolves by a two-step map-then-ordinance lookup.


Abductive Reasoning

Infer the hypothesis that would best explain a surprising observation, accepted provisionally and held defeasibly against better candidates.


Abilene Paradox

A group converges on an action no member privately endorses because each misreads the others' silence or polite assent as genuine preference, so the aggregation channel filters out exactly the disagreement that would have revealed the better option.


Absence as Information

The non-occurrence of an expected event is itself a positive signal.


Absence Of Evidence Vs Evidence Of Absence

A null finding becomes evidence against a claim only in proportion to how likely the search was to detect the claim had it been true.


Absorbing State Under Restricted Modality

A state one can enter but not leave with one's available modality of action.


Abstract Data Type

Specify a component by its externally observable behaviour while suppressing its implementation, so any conforming implementation is interchangeable behind the contract.


Abstract Work

A content identity that persists across its concrete carriers, with an explicit criterion for which instance-variations preserve the work and which fork a new one.


Access Catchment

The set of users who can reach a node given friction and a tolerance horizon.


Access Friction

An entry-asymmetric cost paid only by those crossing a membership boundary, shaping who is present rather than who is qualified.


Accidental Vs Essential Complexity

A system's complexity splits into the irreducible difficulty of the problem and the removable difficulty introduced by the chosen approach.


Accommodation

Systems modify internal structure or behavior in response to external pressures.


Accumulation

A stock grows or shrinks as the time-integral of its net inflow minus outflow, so stocks and flows live on different objects and cannot be equated.


Action Bias

When acting and not acting have similar expected payoffs, decision-makers systematically prefer to act, because action is more visible and attributable than inaction, biasing choice toward doing something beyond what the payoff calculus justifies.


Activation Energy

The minimum input that must be supplied to push a thermodynamically favorable but stalled process past a barrier before momentum carries it to completion.


Adaptive Radiation

A variable source population given access to a newly opened, niche-structured space of opportunity fans out rapidly into many specialized subtypes, then consolidates as niches saturate — a burst gated jointly on opportunity, variability, and niche structure.


Adaptive Redirection

Respond to evidence against a current course by selecting a materially different course that preserves and redeploys load-bearing learning or capability from the old one.


Additive Bias

When asked to improve a system, agents reliably reach first for adding a component and underweight removing one, so the search distribution over transformations is direction-asymmetric and long-lived systems accrete past their purpose-optimal complexity.


Adjacency Pair

A typed first move that conditions a second and makes its absence noticeable.


Adversarial Boundary Navigation

An adaptive opponent searches a rule's boundary for the cheapest legal-side configuration that keeps the prohibited substance.


Adversarial Signal Imitation

Adversarial signal imitation copies the observable cues that normally distinguish a trusted hidden type while avoiding the cost or constraint that made those cues informative.


Adverse Selection

Hidden pre-contractual types make participation under uniform terms systematically more attractive to the types worst for the uninformed side, degrading or unraveling the pool.


Affordance

An action possibility offered by the fit between an agent and its environment.


Agency

A system pursues representable goals through actions whose selection is sensitive to its beliefs about its situation, via a goal-representation, world-model, and action-selection coupling.


Aggregate-Marginal Divergence

The aggregate trends one way while the next unit's contribution trends the other.


Aggregation

Deliberately collapsing many items into a single summary, choosing which information to discard to gain tractability.


Alertness

A standing capacity to notice, distinct from the act of attending.


Aliasing

Sampling a signal below the rate its information content demands folds distinct high-frequency states onto identical low-frequency ones, fabricating false structure that masquerades as real signal.


Allocation

Assign a limited supply across competing claimants under a feasibility constraint, independent of which criterion fills in the rule.


Allometry and Scaling Law

Properties scale nonlinearly with size according to characteristic exponents.


Amara's Law

The impact of a new technology or intervention is systematically overestimated over short horizons and underestimated over long ones, because forecasters project linearly from a salient early signal onto a non-linear, slowly compounding realization curve.


Anna Karenina Principle

Success requires every one of a set of necessary conditions to hold at once while failure follows from the absence of any single one, so successes look alike, failures look idiosyncratic, and the system is gated by its weakest unsatisfied condition.


Annealing

Lift a stuck system into a high-mobility regime, then withdraw the agitation along a controlled schedule so it settles into a better configuration than it could reach cold.


Antagonist

An inert binder occupies a recognition site, denying access without triggering its function.


Anthropomorphism

Surface cues recruit a human agent-model for a nonhuman or non-agent target whose agency or mental states have not been established, so intention, emotion, or understanding is inferred more cheaply than it is verified.


Anti-Commons Tragedy

A resource is systematically under-used because too many independent agents each hold a right to exclude and assembling their consents is too costly, so the resource sits idle even though every party would benefit from putting it to use — the formal dual of the commons.


Anti-Coordination Game

Each player's payoff is higher when its action differs from the others', so the best-response correspondence is anti-aligned, pure equilibria are asymmetric, and the hard problem becomes who plays which role — the formal dual of a coordination game.


Anticipatory Neutralization

Forward-looking agents pre-adjust to offset an anticipated intervention's intended effect.


Antifragility

A system that gains capability from stressors and volatility, not merely withstands them.


Apparent Variety Masks Shared Driver

Surface multiplicity overstates true independence when a hidden common driver couples the items.


Applicability Scope

An artifact publishes a bounded region of conditions under which its outputs or guarantees hold, so consumers can detect out-of-scope use before it causes harm.


Approach-Avoidance Conflict

A single goal that pulls and repels at once, where competing gradients balance at an intermediate point and trap the actor in vacillation.


Arbitrage (Generalized)

Exploiting a discrepancy in price, value, or perception across a boundary that friction keeps from equilibrating, extracting the spread until it closes.


Aspectual Individual

Treating a single underlying entity, under a fixed role or aspect, as a distinct derived bearer of properties with its own narrower existence conditions.


Associative Memory

Content-addressable storage where a cue retrieves linked content.


Associative Property Transfer

A property flows along an associative link rather than along a causal or evidential one.


Assumption

A proposition treated as true for the purposes of some reasoning without being currently demonstrated within it, forming the load-bearing layer between what is given and what is concluded.


Asymmetric Attack Defense Cost

On a shared channel, the cost ratio between producing harm and producing correction determines whether defense is sustainable by effort or requires structural redesign.


Asymmetric Flux

A direction- or channel-selective boundary drives accumulation even under symmetric forcing.


Asymmetric Interface Tolerance

At any interface, each side's strictness in enforcing the spec is an independent design parameter, and the four combinations produce qualitatively different long-term equilibria.


Asymmetric Screening

A cheap, deliberately one-sided-error filter gates an expensive authoritative check.


Asymmetry

Directed imbalance in a relation whose two sides are not interchangeable under swap.


Asymptotic Behavior

In the limit, only the dominant term matters, so behavior is classified by growth class rather than exact value and small or fast-decaying contributions are discarded.


Attention

The selective allocation of a fixed processing capacity to some inputs while the rest are filtered out, surfacing scarcity upstream of every decision.


Attentional Capacity

Finite pool of selection bandwidth whose exceeded supply degrades processing through interference, slowing, or capture.


Attestation

A verifiable, principal-binding, tamper-evident mark lets a third party confirm who committed to what.


Attractor Selection and Basin Control

System dynamics directed toward stable states via basin manipulation.


Authentication

Binding an asserted identity or origin to admissible evidence through a procedure that yields a verdict, before trust, access, or weight is granted.


Authority

The recognized, legitimate right to issue binding decisions within a defined scope, distinct from raw coercive force or mere persuasive influence.


Authority Delegation Under Uncertainty

Preposition decision authority at operational levels for contingencies.


Authority Handoff

A role with binding authority and attached state transfers between occupants without breaking either.


Automaticity

Execute a trigger-to-output pathway with little contemporaneous stepwise supervision, gaining speed and low control cost while sacrificing inspectability, interruptibility, and rapid adaptation.


Autonomy

A unit's behavior is governed by its own internal rules or chosen reasons rather than external direction, defined by the inner-versus-outer authority asymmetry over a scoped domain.


Axiom

A claim a system declines to derive — a load-bearing starting point accepted without proof so that the rest of the structure can be built on top of it.


Axiomatic Incompatibility

A small set of individually plausible axioms is provably jointly unsatisfiable, forcing a chosen trade-off.


Backpressure

A return signal from a downstream stage throttles upstream production to its own capacity, converting a one-way push into a two-way conversation that holds the system at the bottleneck's throughput instead of accumulating hidden queue debt.


Backtracking

Extend a partial solution one step at a time and reverse the most recent commitment as soon as a constraint proves it cannot succeed, preserving earlier work.


Bargaining Power

One side can shift agreed or imposed terms toward itself because rejecting agreement is less costly to it than to its counterpart, so a disparity in credible outside options changes how jointly available surplus is divided.


Baseline Deviation

An observation is interpreted against a declared reference and flagged as departing from it, producing deviation as a first-class fact.


Basis

A minimal independent generating set — the smallest collection from which every element of a space can be produced, with no member derivable from the others.


Batch Processing

Collect many discrete work-items so a costly setup is paid once and amortised over the group, trading lower per-item cost for higher per-item latency.


Batch Size

The granularity at which a stream of work is grouped, trading setup cost amortised per item against flow, delay, risk, and feedback-lag costs that rise with the group — producing an interior optimum.


Bayesian Cue Integration

Multiple noisy cues to one quantity combine by inverse-variance weighting into a lower-variance estimate.


Beachhead Market

A narrow defensible foothold held to fund expansion into a larger territory.


Belief Formation

Commitment-transition by which an agent comes to hold a proposition as true and act accordingly.


Benign-Sampling Safety Drift

A system near a hazard boundary reads a benign sample of outcomes — uneventful only because the hazard is rare, not because the margin is safe — as proof the safety margin is unnecessary, so each lucky round licenses the next erosion until a low-probability event finds the now-absent buffer.


Bias

Systematic, directional error distinct from random noise.


Bijectivity

A correspondence that is exactly one-to-one and onto — no collisions, no gaps — so it is reversible and the two collections have equal size and information content.


Bimodality

A distribution has two separated local maxima with a lower-density interval between them, a shape that constrains but does not by itself identify the process that produced the two modes.


Binding Problem

Features extracted in parallel along separate channels must be re-paired to the right objects using co-occurrence information no single channel carries.


Bioavailability

The fraction of what is supplied that arrives, in usable form, at the locus where it acts.


Biofouling

Opportunistic matter accumulates at a working interface, charging a cost for occupation, not activity.


Birthday Problem

Pairwise collisions in a finite namespace become likely at the square root of its size, not half of it.


Black Swan (High-Impact, Low-Probability Events)


Blinding

Deliberately withholding a specific piece of information from a decision-maker so a downstream judgment cannot be contaminated by it — a targeted severance of a bias channel.


Blockage Release Dynamics

A barrier stores accumulating flow until it fails, converting steady load into a single discontinuous release far larger than the original flow.


Bloom And Bust Cycle

Saturating growth collapses, and the collapse itself becomes a second, often larger, stressor.


Bootstrapping

A system initialises and grows itself from a minimal seed using only its own products, recursively constructing each next stage without an external scaffold, until it reaches its target operating state.


Bottleneck

The single limiting stage that caps an entire system's throughput.


Boundary Disclosure Card

A small, schematized, standardized disclosure attached at an artifact's reuse boundary so that consuming it and reading it are the same event.


Boundary Signal Spillover

A signal aimed at one audience reaches adjacent audiences whose own response overflows the planner's apparatus.


Boundary State Loss

State crossing a carrier boundary through a bounded artifact is constitutively reduced, surfacing later as failure.


Bracketing

Deliberately suspending a held frame from operative use within a scoped inquiry.


Braess's Paradox

Adding capacity to a network of self-optimizing users can shift the equilibrium and make aggregate performance worse.


Branching and Merging

Lines of development that diverge and later recombine into one.


Brandolini's Law

Producing a corruptive claim is structurally cheaper than correcting it, so open channels saturate with uncorrected error.


Bricolage

Producing a working solution by recombining the heterogeneous resources at hand under a fixed inventory.


Brinkmanship

Deliberately raising a stochastic risk of shared catastrophe, using the rising probability as a bargaining lever.


Broken Windows Theory

Visible unrepaired disorder signals weakened enforcement, lowering the perceived cost of further violation in a self-reinforcing cascade.


Buffering

A maintained intermediate capacity that absorbs excess and releases it during shortfall, smoothing variation and decoupling a source from a consumer whose rates do not match.


Bulkhead Pattern

Partition a shared critical resource into sibling compartments so one compartment's failure stays local instead of draining the whole.


Bycatch

A selective process aimed at one target class also captures non-target classes because of the selector's finite specificity, and the harm persists because the success metric counts only the target.


Bypassed Safeguard

A protective control is systematically routed around by the very operators it was meant to protect, because it imposes friction against a production task and the workaround is locally rewarded and globally invisible until the rare hazard arrives.


Bystander Effect

A coordination failure in which each potential responder's chance of acting falls as the group grows, so more available helpers can paradoxically mean less help.


Cadence

The recurring beat or rate at which repeated operations or periods are spaced — the tempo that sets how often, not the unit it spaces or the bare fact of repeating.


Caldera Collapse

A structure fails not from load or rot but because its support was quietly evacuated from beneath.


Calibrated Rule versus Moving World

A rule, model, or policy fitted to a past distribution of the world degrades as the world it was calibrated on drifts away from that distribution.


Calibration

Aligning a system's output to a trusted reference by measuring deviation, adjusting to reduce it, and monitoring for drift.


Calibration Anomaly

A quantitative theory-vs-observation gap that survives noise and measurement error and constrains which assumption is wrong.


Callback

A named action handed off in advance, to be invoked later by someone else when a specified condition arises, releasing the registrant from synchronous waiting.


Canonical Form

A unique distinguished representative per equivalence class lets equivalence be tested by identity of representatives.


Capability Separation

Issuance is restricted to a privileged party while verification is open, tied by a forgery-prevention mechanism.


Capacity-Recovery Interval

While a system remains able to act, suspend or sharply reduce its load for a bounded interval with entry, restorative-process, and exit conditions, trading current output for replenished capacity before continued operation crosses a negative-yield threshold.


Carrying Capacity

The sustainable load envelope of a system: the maximum demand it can carry indefinitely before sustained operation begins consuming its own substrate and lowering future capacity.


Cartesian Product

All combinations of independent dimensions, one choice per axis.


Cascade

A change in one element triggers a chain of further changes.


Catalysis

A facilitator lowers the barrier of a permitted-but-slow transformation on a specific pathway and returns unconsumed each cycle, so a small quantity transforms a large substrate over many turnovers.


Category

Describe a system by its arrows and their composition, not by what its objects are.


Category Retrieval Lock In

A category label that made routine retrieval cheap obstructs novel re-use, because the retrieval infrastructure has compiled the label in place of the property list.


Center Of Gravity

In an adversarial system, the single cohesion-bearing node whose disruption disproportionately changes the whole contest — concentrating both defence and attack at that point.


Central Limit Theorem

Summing many independent finite-variance contributions yields a Gaussian envelope that forgets the shapes of its parts.


Certification

A trusted third party attests, after a defined evaluation, that an entity meets a standard, and issues a portable token downstream parties use as a substitute for re-doing the evaluation.


Ceteris Paribus

Analyzing a foreground subsystem while explicitly holding the rest of the system fixed, tracking the gap.


Change Notification

Advance warning, directed at those who depend on a system, that it is about to change in a way they need lead time to prepare for.


Channel

A bounded conduit between source and receiver whose capacity, alphabet, and noise profile are constitutive of what can cross it — a fact outside the channel's bandwidth, codebook, or noise floor is structurally inexpressible through it.


Channel Capacity

Any information-bearing medium has a hard upper bound on reliable throughput that effort cannot exceed.


Chesterton's Fence

The persistence of a structure is evidence that it encodes a constraint, so understand its function before removing it.


Circuit Breaker

An automatic protective cutoff that trips, isolates, and resets on reaching a danger threshold.


Classification

Sorting entities into discrete categories by explicit rules, turning unbounded variation into a finite, reusable map for downstream reasoning and action.


Clearance Rate

The rate at which a bounded system removes substrate is a control surface separable from input, with kinetic regime and vulnerability that input-side reasoning misses.


Client Server Model

An asymmetric request-response relation in which one party holds a capability and many others initiate to consume it.


Close Reading

The disciplined posture of treating an artefact's smallest meaningful units as load-bearing evidence, suspending paraphrase until the grain is exhausted and binding every higher-order claim to cited marks.


Clustering

Partitioning a population into groups by within-group similarity in a chosen feature space without predefined labels, so the labels are an output rather than an input.


Clustering Illusion

A finite sample from a random process is misread as patterned because randomness reliably produces clumps that no null model has been compared against.


Co-location

Distinct entities or functions occupy the same bounded place during an overlapping interval, reducing separation while leaving their interaction and purpose unspecified.


Co-Presence

Co-presence exists when two or more agents are mutually available for reciprocal awareness and response within the same effective interactional here-and-now, whether that shared situation is physical or mediated.


Coarsening

Boundary cost drives a population of units toward fewer and larger, content flowing small to large.


Coastal Squeeze

An immobile subject is compressed between an advancing front and a fixed rear, with no exit.


Coercion

Shaping another agent's choice by manipulating the costs and threats attached to their options, so the agent itself 'chooses' the coercer's preferred action — the common parent of forcing an action (compellence) and forcing restraint (deterrence).


Coevolution

Reciprocal, mutually-selective adaptation between coupled systems.


Cognitive Appraisal

The interpretive step that evaluates a situation's significance and one's coping resources, determining the emotional and behavioral response rather than the raw stimulus doing so.


Cognitive Apprenticeship

Making the normally hidden reasoning of experts visible through modeling, coaching, and fading support so novices can internalize tacit cognitive skill.


Cognitive Flexibility

Switching the active frame from a held repertoire when a trigger detects the current one has stopped fitting the context.


Cognitive Offloading

Moving capacity-bounded internal work onto an external substrate, trading internal load for an external dependency that must be maintained.


Cognitive Resource Depletion

Cognitive capacity degrades from sustained resource consumption.


Coherence Breakdown Under External Interaction

The loss of a system's internal phase alignment or coordination when it couples to an uncontrolled, noisy environment that drains coherence into inaccessible correlations.


Collingridge Dilemma

Information about a system's consequences rises as the cost of changing it rises, so the window where intervention is both informed and feasible may be narrow or absent.


Commensurability

Diverse values expressed in common metric enabling comparison.


Commitment

An agent binds itself in the present to a future course of action or to the truth of a proposition, creating a new constraint on future behavior that others can rely on.


Commitment Device

A self-imposed constraint that binds one's own future choices.


Common Ground

Iterated mutual recognition stabilises a shared body of propositions that licenses abbreviated, indexical communication and makes joint action safe.


Common Knowledge

A fact is common knowledge when everyone knows it, everyone knows that everyone knows it, and so on without limit — the infinite-tower condition that enables coordination.


Common-Medium Intermediation

A shared medium collapses N-by-N pairwise adaptation cost into N adaptations to a single hub.


Commons Governance

A community co-stewards a shared resource through explicit rules for membership, contribution or use, monitoring, conflict resolution, sanctions, and nested authority, preventing distributed access from dissolving into neglect or depletion.


Communication Repair

When agents sharing state over an unreliable channel detect divergence, they pause the primary exchange, invoke a meta-channel act to restore alignment, and resume — making shared meaning robust to noise without perfect transmission.


A sharing adversary community out-learns a slow-updating rule system because discovery cost amortizes across many opponents.


Comparative Method

Systematically juxtaposing selected cases so that their similarities and differences do the causal-inference work that controlled experiments cannot.


Comparative Statics

Compare two equilibria before and after a parameter change, ignoring the path between them.


Comparison

Place items in a shared frame along chosen dimensions to read off a relation between them.


Compatibility

The relational condition under which two or more entities can coexist or compose without breakage, interference, or contradiction.


Compellence

Imposing ongoing costs to force a positive action and keeping them live until compliance — the action-demanding counterpart to deterrence, structurally harder because compliance is publicly visible and deadline-bound.


Competition

Rivalrous pursuit of a scarce prize where one party's gain is another's loss.


Competitive Niche Differentiation

Competitive niche differentiation occurs when rivals reduce direct overlap by specializing along different resource, function, or performance dimensions, trading general reach for coexistence in complementary niches.


Complement

Everything in a declared universe that is not in a designated subset.


Complementarity

Two non-overlapping roles that jointly exhaust a whole and require each other.


Complete Enumeration

A programmatic commitment to map every unit of a defined population, where completeness itself is the load-bearing property that unlocks inferences sampling cannot.


Composition

Arranges components into a cohesive whole.


Computability

The in-principle boundary between problems an effective procedure can solve and those none can.


Concentration

Massing a divisible resource or effort at the decisive point rather than spreading it thin — the deliberate creation of local superiority by accepting weakness elsewhere.


Concept Drift

A learned rule silently loses validity when the input–outcome relationship it was calibrated on changes underneath it.


Conditional Access

A controller couples a desired item with an undesired one, leveraging access asymmetry to force acceptance of both.


Conditional Probability

Re-normalize a probability measure to the information context that is taken as given.


Confidence Annotation

A graded warrant marker attached to a claim that travels with it and tells downstream consumers how much weight to place on it.


Confidentiality

Bind an authorized holder of protected information to a defined scope of use and disclosure, with explicit release, exception, and breach conditions.


Configuration Drift

The silent, monotonic divergence between a system's recorded intended state and its actual running state, driven by accumulated out-of-band changes that bypass the record until a forced reconciliation exposes the gap.


Confirmation Dialog

An enforced pause and re-affirmation inserted before an irreversible action.


Conformity

Aligning one's behaviour or beliefs to a group standard.


Confused Deputy

A privileged intermediary acts on its own authority while the intent originated with an outsider who lacks it, so authority is borrowed without intent being tracked.


Conjugate-Observable Complementarity

Certain observable pairs cannot be jointly specified to arbitrary precision because sharpening one structurally blurs its conjugate — a built-in trade-off of the system, not a measurement limitation.


Conjunctive Path Activation

A latent causal path becomes live only when every state-conditional edge along it conducts at once, making the failure invisible to factor-by-factor audit.


Connectedness

A whole that cannot be split into parts with no relation crossing between them.


Consensus

Producing a single shared decided state from many participants with disagreeing or adversarial views, under a fault model, satisfying agreement, validity, and termination together.


Conservation Event

A deliberate, bounded intervention that arrests or reverses a system's decay away from a reference state judged worth preserving.


Consistency

A set of commitments cannot jointly derive a contradiction.


Consistency Model

An explicit contract over which observations of shared state are legal when updates are concurrent.


Constraint Release

Removing a coupled regulator that was actively suppressing a system reveals an intrinsic capacity that the prior baseline had masked.


Construct Validity

Whether a measurement procedure actually captures the theoretical construct it claims to, rather than a correlated but distinct surrogate, across a three-layer construct-proxy-signal gap.


Contact-Response Decomposition

Impact decomposes into how much contact occurs between a system and a driver times how strongly the system responds per unit of contact, two independently actionable terms.


Contagion

Spread of a state from element to element through contact.


Containerization

Wrap a unit with its dependencies behind a standardized exterior so substrate-blind handlers can move it intact.


Containment

Holding a hazard, process, or agent within a deliberately maintained perimeter to prevent its spread or uncontrolled interaction with the surroundings.


Context

Surrounding state that selects which content a fixed focal signal carries.


Context-Dependent Preference

Keep the focal options fixed while changing an unchosen comparator, menu, or evaluation procedure, and the ordering among those focal options can change because value is constructed relative to that context.


Context Stripping

Context stripping preserves a focal signal while removing meaning-bearing surrounding state, widening or redirecting the interpretations the unchanged signal can support.


Contract

A multi-party bundle of obligations, breach criteria, and remedies under an accepted enforcement regime.


Contradiction

A collection of commitments is contradictory when it jointly entails both a proposition and its negation, so no admissible interpretation can make every commitment hold together.


Contraposition

Run an implication backward: from the absence of the consequence, infer the absence of the cause.


Control / Data Channel Confusion

A receiver interprets attacker-controlled data as authoritative instructions because the protocol separates control from data by content inspection rather than by structure.


Control Sample

A deliberately matched comparator held alongside the case of interest so that the difference between them isolates the effect of the factor under test from the shared background.


Controlled Reentry

Re-establishing a suspended activity or state through staged, monitored steps with the capacity to abort, because returning to normal is a separate engineered process and not a simple reversal of the exit.


Convergent Evolution

Separate lineages independently arrive at the same form or solution under similar pressures, with no shared inheritance and no interaction between them connecting the outcomes — the same answer found more than once.


Convexity

Mixtures preserve membership and the average of values dominates the value of the average.


Convolution

Each output is a sliding, weighted local mixture of an input produced by one fixed kernel.


Conway's Law

Any artifact built by a collective acquires a structure homomorphic to the communication topology of the collective that built it.


Cooperation

Agents bear individual costs to produce a shared benefit.


Cooperative Principle and Gricean Maxims


Coordination

Aligning independently controlled actors so their separate actions combine into a coherent collective outcome despite distributed decision-making and incomplete shared information.


Coordination-Overhead Inversion

A support scaffold recursively reproduces its own coordination demand until the supporting layer consumes more capacity than the activity it was meant to support.


Coordination Problem and Equilibrium Selection

Multiple stable equilibria require alignment on single outcome.


Correlated Capacity Demand

When demands on a shared finite resource are tail-correlated rather than independent, capacity sized for independent peaks fails at the rare joint exceedance.


Correlated-Source Attribution Failure

When combined sources share underlying variation, joint inference stays strong while attribution to any individual source becomes unstable, sign-flipping, or arbitrary.


Correlation

Systematic co-variation between variables, distinct from causation.


Counter-Current Exchange

Two streams flowing in opposite directions along a shared interface preserve a near-constant driving gradient along the whole contact, lifting extraction efficiency toward unity.


Counterfactual Proximity Weighting

An internal signal is graded not by the outcome alone but by its distance to a nearby counterfactual outcome of different value, so near misses carry near-reward signals.


Counterfactual Subtraction

An effect is estimated by subtracting a constructed baseline representing what would have obtained absent the intervention, so the inference rests on the baseline's credibility, not the arithmetic.


Counterresponse Offset

An intervention improves a target but changes a coupled incentive, exposure, or behavior in a way that induces a counterresponse which erodes part or all of the intended aggregate gain.


Covariance

Center two varying quantities, multiply their paired deviations, and average: the signed result reveals whether departures co-move while retaining their joint scale rather than normalizing it away.


Coverage / Reachability

A completeness claim in the surjective direction: every required target in a target set is reachable from at least one of the system's inputs, pathways, or mechanisms.


Credible Commitment

Deliberately constrain your own future choices so a promise or threat stays incentive-compatible at the moment of execution.


Criteria of Individuation

The rules a system fixes for what makes something one entity — when parts compose a single whole, when two presentations are the same entity, and which kind supplies a thing's persistence — together constituting its inventory of countable individuals.


Critical Juncture

Moment where small variations produce divergent locked-in paths.


Critical Mass

The minimum quantity needed to sustain a self-perpetuating process.


Critical Period

A time-gated window of elevated malleability during which a configuration can be acquired, after which the same inputs are far harder or impossible to take on.


Criticality

Regime poised at a phase boundary where response becomes scale-free and correlations diverge.


Cromwell's Rule

Never assign prior probability of exactly 0 or 1 to a contingent proposition, because multiplicative Bayesian updating can never move a belief away from those endpoints.


Cross-Boundary Subsidy

An asymmetric, sustained flow of a sustaining resource across a boundary holds a recipient above its endogenous capacity, creating donor-coupling vulnerability mistaken for autonomy.


Cross Cutting Relationship

Reading relative temporal order from intersection geometry — a feature that interrupts or overprints another must be younger than the one it cuts.


Cross-Dimensional Leakage

A single shared variance source contaminates multiple supposedly-independent output dimensions, inflating their apparent correlations above the true cross-dimensional signal.


Cross-Level Inference

Carry a predicate, relationship, estimate, or explanation from one level of an organized system to another through a stated or assumed bridge whose preservation conditions determine whether the target claim is warranted.


Crossover Interaction

The same input moves an outcome in opposite directions across levels of a second condition, so neither factor has a context-free sign and a main-effect average can cancel the mechanism to zero.


Crowding Out

Introducing or expanding one activity inside a finite shared substrate displaces an existing activity that depended on that same substrate.


Cue Outcome Decoupling

A cue that once reliably tracked an outcome has its coupling broken, while the cue-following behavior persists and grows more harmful the better it tracks the now-decoupled cue.


Culminating Point

The point on an advancing effort's trajectory where the net yield of one more unit of advance crosses zero and turns negative.


Cultural Friction

Incompatibilities arise when external artifacts meet cultural norms.


Curse Of Dimensionality

Volume, sparsity, and distance intuitions degrade so fast with added dimensions that low-dimensional methods break down qualitatively, not just quantitatively.


Custody Transfer

A discrete moment at which responsibility for something passes from one holder to another, releasing the first and binding the second through an explicit triggering act.


Cut

A partition of a network's vertices and the crossing edges, converting global connectivity into a local edge-set.


Cycle

A closed path in a network that returns to its origin, opening return, foreclosing ordering, and creating a loop invariant.


Data-Control Plane Breach

Untrusted content crosses into the data channel un-inertised and an interpreter, operating correctly by its own rules, executes it as control, wielding the defender's authority for the attacker.


Data Drift

A static learned mapping silently loses accuracy as the deployment distribution drifts away from the distribution it was calibrated on.


Data Leakage

Information that should have been unavailable at decision time crosses the firewall into calibration, inflating measured performance until deployment exposes the gap.


Data Structure

An arrangement of information that makes some operations cheap at the structural cost of others.


Deception Blowback

A misleading signal injected into a shared channel to deceive an adversary returns through an unintended path to confuse the deceiver's own decision loop, allies, downstream systems, or future selves, at a cost the original calculation never scored.


Decidability Computability

A class of yes/no questions admits a finite procedure that always terminates with the correct answer.


Decision

Committing to one alternative from a set under uncertainty and trade-off, collapsing open deliberation into a chosen path and foreclosing the others.


Decision Cycle Subordination

A slower actor's decision cycle becomes forced to respond to a faster actor's tempo, and responding faster deepens the subordination rather than escaping it.


Decomposition

Breaking a whole into parts that can be analyzed independently and recombined to reconstitute the whole, making complexity tractable through divide-and-conquer.


Decoupling Point

The buffered interface where a flow splits from forecast-driven push upstream into order-driven pull downstream, and whose position sets the lead-time, inventory, and customisation trade-offs.


Defamiliarization

Re-presenting a familiar object in an estranged form that breaks perceptual automatism, slows perception, and surfaces previously naturalised assumptions.


Defeat In Detail

A globally weaker attacker beats a globally stronger but distributed adversary by achieving local superiority and engaging the parts sequentially before they can combine.


Defect

A small, localised deviation from a regular structure that, propagating through the structure's coupling channels, dictates the system's macroscopic behaviour out of all proportion to its size.


Defense In Depth

Stacking multiple independent protective layers between threat and asset so that only a correlated breach across all layers produces total loss.


Demand

A schedule relating quantity sought to generalized cost, with slope, elasticity, and substitution structure.


Denormalization

Deliberately re-introduce controlled redundancy against a canonical form, trading a synchronization burden for access-side wins.


Dense Set

A smaller set reaches arbitrarily close to every point of a larger one.


Dependency

Directed relation in which one element relies on another being present, prior, compatible, or supplied, with a specifiable failure mode if the condition is unmet.


Dependency Distribution Concentration

How a system's dependency weight is distributed across providers — concentrated or spread — is a structural property that bounds its fragility independent of its own defenses.


Derivative Amplification

In a serial chain where each upstream stage responds to the rate of change of its downstream neighbour, variation amplifies geometrically with chain length.


Designed-Out Misuse

Affordances and defaults are arranged so the misuse path is costly or impossible while the legitimate path stays easy, preventing harm before enforcement has to act.


Desire Path

An involuntary trace worn into a designed environment's substrate by repeated use, recording revealed preference where the design fails to accommodate it.


Determinism

Present state plus laws fix exactly one successor state.


Deterrence

Preventing an action not by blocking it but by arranging consequences so the target's own cost-benefit calculation makes the action unattractive.


Develops-From Relation

A later entity came to be by stage-wise transformation of a continuing predecessor, the same continuant passing through directed, qualitatively distinct stages under a generative rule.


Diagnostically Inert Signal

A signal that announces a failure but carries none of the content needed to act on it, splitting detection-completeness from recovery-completeness.


Diagonal Impossibility

In a self-modeling system, a putative total analyzer is refuted by constructing an object engineered to make the analyzer's verdict on it contradict the property it decides.


Differential Decay

Two coupled signals decay at different rates, so the surviving component carries forward a meaning the original pair never intended — often with a sign flip.


Directed Acyclic Graph

Directed edges with no return path impose a one-way order on a whole structure.


Discrepancy-Driven Correction

Iteratively close the signed gap between a target and an observation.


Discretion

Latitude granted to an agent to decide within bounded limits.


Discretization-Induced Artifact

Converting a continuous quantity into discrete buckets produces apparent structure that is a property of the bucket boundaries rather than of the underlying phenomenon.


Diseconomies of Scale

Rising per-unit cost once scale grows past a point.


Disjointness

Two or more populated collections share no element.


Dislocation Motion

Large-scale change of an ordered medium achieved by propagating a localised defect rather than rearranging every unit at once.


Dispersion

A co-launched bundle separates because propagation rate depends on a per-component property.


Disruptive Innovation

An initially inferior entrant on a cheaper, steeper trajectory crosses the incumbent's value curve and displaces it, because the terms of competition shift rather than the entrant winning on the old ones.


Dissipation

Irreversible conversion of organized energy or order into thermalized, unrecoverable form across many degrees of freedom.


Dissonance

The structural pressure of mis-fit held in coexistence, where elements that violate a rule of fit generate a tension pressing toward resolution, sustain, or reframing.


Distortion

Systematic, mapping-induced deviation of an output from a faithful rendering of its input.


Distributional Assumption

Commitment to assume uncertain quantities follow specific distribution.


Distributional Effects

An aggregate outcome conceals systematically heterogeneous, unit-level changes.


Divergence-Convergence in the Design Process


Diversification

Spreading exposures across positions whose failure modes are uncorrelated reduces total-outcome variance; correlation, not count, drives the benefit.


Diversity

Maintaining functionally distinct types within a system so that variation provides resilience and coverage that uniformity cannot.


Division of Labor

Partition a joint activity into specialized sub-tasks assigned to distinct performers whose outputs are then re-integrated.


Double Counting

Including the same underlying unit more than once in an aggregate because overlapping buckets are summed without subtracting their intersection.


Dragon King Theory

The largest events in some complex systems come from a distinct mechanism — synchronization or bifurcation near criticality — leaving them above the power-law tail and partly predictable.


Dunning-Kruger Effect

The miscalibration in which the skills needed to judge one's own competence are the same skills one lacks, so the least competent most overestimate their ability.


Echo Chamber

A bounded community whose input filter and internal reinforcement gradient amplify shared beliefs and strip out the corrective signal that would moderate them, while members experience the environment as complete rather than filtered.


Ecological Succession

Stage-ordered change in which the current occupants themselves modify the substrate, determining which stage can come next through facilitation, inhibition, or tolerance.


Economies Of Scope

Cost savings from producing varied outputs together.


Economy Of Force

Deliberate minimum-sufficient under-resourcing of non-decisive efforts so that mass can be concentrated at the decisive point.


Ecotone

A transitional zone of measurable depth where two regimes overlap and mix, generating gradients, elevated exchange, and zone-specific structure that neither regime alone hosts.


Edge Effect

Where two regimes meet, a thin high-gradient band forms a distinct third regime with its own resident phenomena, absent from either interior.


Editorial Independence

An evaluative judgment institutionally insulated from the parties it affects.


Efference Copy

Routing an internal copy of a command to the perceiver so self-caused effects can be predicted and subtracted, leaving only the world-caused remainder.


Efficiency

Judge an input–output arrangement against its feasible alternatives: it is efficient when no alternative preserves or improves the specified result while using fewer resources, and its inefficiency is the dominated slack removable without sacrifice.


Efficiency Rebound

An efficiency gain lowers the effective cost per unit of an activity, inducing enough additional demand to offset part or all of the resource saving expected at fixed activity volume.


Eigenvalue And Eigenvector

A transformation's invariant directions and the scalars by which it stretches them.


Elasticity

The unit-free ratio of a fractional response to a fractional stimulus.


Elicitation Channel Contribution

The recorded representation of a system's unobserved state is a joint product of state and the elicitation channel, so the analyst's marginal of interest is recoverable only by controlling the channel.


Embeddability

Whether a structured substrate admits a conflict-free placement inside a constrained ambient target.


Embedding

A structure-preserving injection of one system faithfully into a richer one.


Emic And Etic

A paired dual-description regime in which a phenomenon is captured under an insider scheme closed by participants' competence and an outsider scheme closed by analytic framework, with their divergence treated as a finding.


Emotional Contagion

Automatic spread of affect from person to person through a group.


Empirical No-Failure Anchor

Select the highest tested input at which a specified failure was not detected, carrying the test design and detection sensitivity with the value and treating it as a bound on—not an identification of—the underlying failure threshold.


Empty Set

Absence made into a fully-typed, first-class object rather than an error.


Encoding And Decoding

The paired transformation by which content is converted into a transmissible code by an encoder and recovered from it by a decoder, with faithful round-trip conditional on a shared scheme.


Encoding Specificity

Retrievability depends on the overlap between features active at encoding and features available at retrieval, because context is co-encoded into the storage key.


Encounter Surface

A durable, accessible, mutually observable, normed layer where strangers can come into contact.


Ensemble

Multiple comparable realizations are generated or assembled and analyzed together through a probability model and aggregation rule to characterize a distribution rather than a single trajectory.


Enthymeme

An argument whose load-bearing premises are deliberately left unstated for the audience to supply from shared assumptions, making the conclusion co-authored and the persuasion contingent on assumption-base match.


Environmental Coupling Strength

Rate of energy, information, or material exchange across boundary.


Epistemic Action

Changing the environment not to advance the goal directly but to make the next mental step cheaper, trading muscle for cognitive load.


Epistemic Humility

Calibrating the confidence of one's claims to the actual strength of the evidence and staying open to revision when new information arrives.


Epistemic Mode Of A Proposition

The same proposition can be held in different epistemic modes — asserted-fact, assumption, axiom, hypothesis, premise, belief, conjecture — and the mode, independent of the content, gates which operations are licensed on it: you may provisionally rely on an assumption, must test a hypothesis, cannot refute an axiom within its system, must discharge a premise.


Equivalence-Preserving Rewriting

Transforming an object into a behaviourally equivalent but operationally different form under an explicit equivalence relation, then selecting among rewrites by an orthogonal cost criterion.


Equivalence Principle

Gravity indistinguishable from acceleration.


Equivalence Relation

Groups elements into equivalence classes.


Equivariance

A map whose output transforms in step with transformations of its input.


Equivocation

A single token is used with two distinct referents at two points in a chain that presumes meaning-fixity, so an apparently sound inference silently fails.


Escalation Dominance

Holding a credible per-rung advantage across a conflict's intensity ladder, so the contest resolves below the top because the disadvantaged party prefers stopping to climbing into a losing position.


Escape and Leakage

Constrained quantities exit through unintended pathways.


Eutrophication

An enabling input crosses an assimilation ceiling and inverts into a degrading load, driving a self-amplifying bloom that depletes a secondary resource and locks in a worse regime.


Evaluation

Apply a criterion-bearing frame to a bounded object, interpret its relevant features against that frame, and produce a verdict, score, rank, or action-guiding judgment.


Evaluative Rating

Compress an evaluative judgment into a position on a shared ordered scale that downstream actors can act on without re-examining the evidence.


Event-Centered Modeling

Making events the primary nodes through which entities, places, and periods are connected, so that everything else is derived as a projection of the event log.


Event Lifecycle Phases

Decomposing a hazard-bearing event into pre-event, event, and post-event regimes and treating each phase, not the event, as the primary unit of intervention design.


Eventual Consistency

Distributed copies of shared state are allowed to diverge under local updates, with a deterministic merge guaranteeing they reconverge once updates stop.


Eventual Realisation of Possibility

In a system subject to many independent trials, every outcome with non-zero per-trial probability eventually occurs, so design posture shifts from per-trial prevention to containment.


Evidence

A defeasible, provenance-bearing relation between an observable trace and a hypothesis about an unobservable state.


Evidence-Fidelity Decay

Delay between event and capture lets backfill silently fuse observation, inference, and reconstruction into one uniform record.


Evidence-Latency Window

A decision must be committed by a deadline while the evidence that would inform it arrives on a separate clock, and the signed gap between the two clocks governs the decision's information state and its repair options.


Evolutionarily Stable Strategy

A population strategy is stable if, once dominant, no rare mutant can invade — equilibrium defined by what survives perturbation, not by ex-ante agreement.


Evolutionary Trap

An agent follows a once-reliable cue more eagerly the stronger it is, straight into harm, because the environment changed and the cue-value coupling broke while the cue-response did not.


Exaptation

A feature co-opted for a function other than the one it arose for.


Exchange

Reciprocal transfer between parties under mutual commitment, with each side's movement keyed to the other's.


Excitation-Inhibition Balance

Two opposed channels run concurrently and sum at every locus, so the system's output is the difference of two large quantities — high-gain, sharply tunable, and catastrophic to lose either side.


Exemplar Retrieval

Answering by reaching for the closest stored case and reusing its response, rather than applying an abstracted rule — the history itself is the model.


Expectancy-Mediated Outcome

An explicit expectation or learned predictive state about an outcome becomes a causal input to that outcome, with the response channel and coupling sign determining whether realization moves toward or away from what was expected.


Expectation Violation

An active prediction or schema specifies what should occur; an incompatible realization crosses a mismatch threshold and triggers surprise, reorientation, or repair, making the violated expectation diagnostically visible.


Expected Utility

Ranking risky options by their probability-weighted utility.


Expected Value

Average a random quantity against its probability measure: the resulting linear functional compresses a distribution to its first moment while discarding dispersion, tails, and other shape.


Experimental Design

Structuring an investigation through deliberate intervention, controlled assignment, and measurement so that causation can be distinguished from mere correlation and confounding.


Explanatory Overlay Masking Structural Debt

An artefact carrying avoidable structural confusion is patched with an informational overlay that makes it locally readable without retiring the underlying problem, and the overlay's local sufficiency quietly crowds out the structural fix that would actually resolve it.


Exposure Creep

Between rare severe shocks, valuable assets accumulate inside a known hazard's impact zone because a quiet history reads as safety, so the next shock's loss is driven by the grown stake rather than by any change in the hazard.


Exposure-Distribution Learning

Exposure-distribution learning updates an internal model toward the empirical frequencies an agent repeatedly encounters, so the model tracks the exposure distribution rather than the target environment whenever the two distributions differ.


Exposure Pathway

The chain of links by which a hazard travels from source to vulnerable target, breakable at any link, turning risk into a graph search over severable routes.


External Analytic Challenge

Expose revisable reasoning to a competent challenger outside its authoring frame, require explicit probes and alternative readings, and route a documented response back before commitment so hidden assumptions can change the work rather than merely receive a later verdict.


Extrapolation Beyond Sampled Regime

A calibrated apparatus is deployed against inputs outside the regime its calibration was established in, while continuing to report the same confidence indicators it would report inside the regime, so its own self-reporting is structurally blind to the regime exit.


Extreme Capture Probability

When valuable targets are rare in a large heterogeneous population, a bounded untargeted sample captures them according to its coverage fraction — only n/N for the single best — so expanding reach or targeting matters more than prestige within the same bounded pool.


Eyes On The Street

Safety and accountability produced as a byproduct of dense incidental observation by embedded participants, conditional on shared space, mutual visibility, and a low-cost intervention pathway.


Fabula And Syuzhet

The chronology of events and the order in which they are told are separable design objects, each optimizable for its own criterion.


Fact-Value Distinction

Keep descriptive claims about what is or occurs distinct from evaluative claims about what is good, justified, or ought to be done, so evidence can constrain a value judgment without silently supplying the value premise that turns description into prescription.


Factorization

Expressing one object as a product of same-type factors under its native operation.


Fading

Gradual withdrawal of instructional support as competence grows.


Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)


Fairness

Judging whether an allocation or procedure treats comparable parties impartially according to a defensible standard, given that multiple such standards can conflict.


Fallacy Of Misplaced Concreteness

Mistaking an abstraction — a model, statistic, or construct — for a concrete thing, then applying interventions licensed only for the particulars to the reified stand-in.


Fallback Path

Maintain an ordered secondary route that takes over when the preferred primary route is unavailable or inadequate, preserving a specified minimum function.


False Dilemma

A partition of a rich option space is presented as exhaustive when it is not, so reasoning proceeds inside cells while real alternatives have been suppressed.


False Positive Paradox

Under a rare base rate, most positive flags are wrong even when the detector is highly accurate.


Falsifiability

A claim is scientific only if it could in principle be empirically refuted.


Fast-Path / Slow-Path Architecture

Handle the common case cheaply and escalate the exceptional case to an expensive path via a trigger.


Feature Engineering

Deliberately transforming the representation of raw observations so a latent regularity becomes legible to a downstream consumer.


Feedforward

A predictive model of an action's consequences is interposed upstream of commitment, so the actor pre-corrects rather than waits for a deviation to feed back.


Feedforward Inhibition

The same input that activates a downstream element simultaneously recruits a brake on it along a parallel path, so the response is shaped by their difference.


Figure-Ground

Perceptual organization of a field into salient figure and receding ground.


First Mover Advantage

When a contest rewards early arrival, the same move yields a different return depending on when in the sequence it is taken.


Fixed Point

A state a transformation leaves unchanged — self-consistency under update — organizing analysis into existence, uniqueness, stability, and basin of attraction.


Flow

Structured movement of energy, matter, or information.


Fold

A layered or extended structure absorbs applied stress by bending rather than breaking, preserving continuity through curvature.


Foresight

Disciplined anticipation of plural possible futures to keep present action adaptive across the range of plausible outcomes.


Form and Content

The relationship between a work's structure and its substance.


Formal System

Symbols, formation rules, axioms, and inference rules closed under mechanical derivation.


Formalization

Rendering informal practice into explicit, codified, rule-governed form.


Founder Effect

A small unrepresentative initial subset starts a new population through a narrow gate, and its idiosyncratic composition is amplified into the descendant's durable identity.


Fracture Toughness

A system's capacity to survive damage by arresting an already-initiated defect's propagation, separating damage initiation from damage spread.


Frame Change

Replace the organizing frame applied to a substantially preserved referent, map or bridge the old and new assignments, and establish the new frame as operative so coordinates, meanings, or responses are systematically re-read.


Frame Problem

After a change, the challenge of bounding which facts now need re-derivation and which persist by default, without re-checking everything.


Free Riding

The systematic under-provision that results when individuals can enjoy a non-excludable shared good without contributing proportionately to producing it.