Lateral inhibition presupposes contrast because its functional role is precisely the construction of perceptual contrast: an activated element suppresses its neighbors, so that local differences are amplified into edges, peaks, and crisp boundaries from a smooth gradient. Contrast supplies the general structural notion that meaning, identity, and discrimination emerge through emphasized differences between elements; lateral inhibition is one distributed mechanism by which a system manufactures that discreteness without central control. Without contrast as the goal-state, mutual sideways suppression has no purpose.

Lateral inhibition presupposes contrast because its sideways suppression mechanism exists to amplify local differences into sharp boundaries.


Lateral inhibition operates as mutual sideways suppression among peers: the more strongly an element is excited, the harder it pushes its neighbours down. This presupposes feedback: the structural arrangement in which a portion of a system's output is routed back to influence subsequent input, closing a loop between cause and effect. Each element's activity becomes a (negative-signed) input to its neighbours' subsequent state. The contrast-enhancing dynamic that produces edges and winners depends on the closed mutual loop; without feedback's routing of output back into input, peer suppression has no mechanism by which to act on the field.

Lateral inhibition presupposes feedback because peer-to-peer mutual suppression is a closed loop in which each element's activity controls its neighbors' inputs.


Lateral inhibition has activated elements suppress their neighbours, amplifying local differences so a single winner or sharp boundary emerges from a field of competitors. This presupposes figure-ground: the structural organization of a perceptual field into a salient figure and a recessive ground, with reciprocal mutually-exclusive assignment in which the boundary belongs to the figure. The neighbour-suppression dynamic is the computational mechanism by which a distributed system manufactures the figure-ground assignment: the more strongly an element is excited, the harder it pushes neighbours toward ground, producing the bounded shaped figure that pops out from formless context.

Lateral inhibition presupposes figure-ground because suppressing neighbors to amplify a winner is the mechanism by which figure separates from ground.


lateral_inhibition is the specific SPATIAL arrangement (active units suppress neighbours to sharpen contrast) of the general applied block; plain inhibition makes no spatial/contrast commitment. inhibition is the substrate-general parent. The 0.9087 similarity resolves to parent-of, not duplicate.

Lateral_inhibition is the specific SPATIAL arrangement (active units suppress neighbours to sharpen contrast) of the general applied block; plain inhibition makes no spatial/contrast commitment.


The law presupposes complexity (the quantity it conserves) and adds two specific claims — an irreducible FLOOR and a SHIFT relation that relocates burden without lowering the total. complexity is the embedding-nearest (0.95) and the quantity the prime is about but not identical to. Complexity supplies the prerequisite condition: Measures system intricacy. Law of Conservation of Complexity operates against that background: Every problem has an irreducible complexity floor that design can shift between parties or moments but cannot reduce below the floor. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


Tesler's law is adjacent to trade_offs but is CONSERVATION not exchange (file 'Not': it conserves the SAME quantity across an interface rather than swapping one good for another). Trade-offs supplies the prerequisite condition: Balancing competing priorities. Law of Conservation of Complexity operates against that background: Every problem has an irreducible complexity floor that design can shift between parties or moments but cannot reduce below the floor. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


The law contains aggregation because its empirical mean or relative frequency is constructed by combining observations into a normalized summary. Remove the sum, count, or empirical-measure aggregation across observations and there is no sample average or frequency whose limit can be asserted. parent_in_child


The law of large numbers is convergence specialized to stochastic empirical averages or frequencies approaching their expectation under stated conditions. An indexed family approaches a declared limit so that sufficiently late members lie arbitrarily close in the relevant convergence mode. The indexed family is a normalized aggregate of random observations, the limit is their expectation or long-run rate, and convergence is in probability or almost surely under probabilistic regularity conditions.


The law of large numbers presupposes probability because its random observations, expectation target, and convergence modes are probabilistic objects. Remove probability measures, random variables, expectation, and probabilistic convergence and the theorem loses both its sequence model and limit claim. The law is a theorem inside probability theory, not a probability measure or the general apparatus for quantifying uncertainty.


The cross-batch note and both frame law_of_the_instrument as a bias, but a STRONGER, structurally-distinct one: the tool inventory shapes which problem is PERCEIVED (upstream construction), not just the downstream verdict. is a specialization of bias, specialized to capability-shaped perception. 'often filed loosely as a cognitive bias' — admit bias as parent while preserving the perceptual-upstream distinction. Bias supplies the genus: Systematic, directional error distinct from random noise. Law of the Instrument preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: The tools an agent possesses systematically bias what it recognises as a problem, what category the problem is sorted into, and what intervention is generated — the world's joints get carved into shapes the tool can grip, and joints it cannot grip become invisible. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


Accumulation supplies the genus: 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. Layered Accumulation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Sequential time-ordered deposition in which each new layer rests atop the prior ones, so the position of a layer encodes when it formed and the stack becomes a readable record of history. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.

Layered Accumulation is a specialization of Accumulation, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Layered accumulation is a specialization of aggregation. The general pattern collapses many items into a unified form that retains chosen features while suppressing detail, with the function encoding a claim about what matters. Layered accumulation instantiates this with the retained feature being deposition sequence and conditions: discrete units stack in time-ordered strata, and the current state is the vertical integral of every preserved past state. The aggregation function preserves time-order and per-layer conditions rather than averaging them away. It is aggregation that retains the historical depth dimension as a readable record.

Layered accumulation is a specific kind of aggregation, retaining sequential deposition history rather than collapsing entries into a flat summary.


Layered accumulation is a specialization of layering. The general layering pattern organizes a system into stacked strata with each layer providing services or abstractions to the next. Layered accumulation specializes by adding two commitments: the layers deposit sequentially in time-ordered fashion, and each layer preserves the conditions of its deposition so the stratigraphy reads as a record of history. The horizontal-strata architecture is retained, with the additional temporal-deposition and history-preservation properties making the stack a readable archive.

Layered accumulation is a specialization of layering in which strata deposit sequentially over time and preserve their conditions of formation.


Layered coordination and oversight is a specialization of coordination in which the alignment of independently controlled actors is achieved through multiple tiers of authority, each responsible for tasks at its own scope, with higher tiers providing strategy, resources, and conflict resolution and lower tiers retaining routine decision rights. It inherits coordination's general apparatus of aligning distributed actors into coherent collective outcomes and specializes by fixing the mechanism to tier differentiation with downward flows of strategy and resources, upward flows of reporting and escalation, and within-tier peer coordination.

Layered coordination and oversight is a specialization of coordination in which alignment is achieved through tiers of authority with bounded scope.


Postponement supplies the genus: Delay the point at which a system commits to a final configuration until more information about which configuration is wanted arrives, trading earliness for accuracy. Lazy Evaluation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Defer work until its result is actually demanded. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.

Lazy Evaluation is a specialization of Postponement, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Lead-and-support PRODUCES a figure-ground organisation across channels — figure_ground is the effect, deference design is the craft. It presupposes figure_ground (the perceptual foreground/background the craft authors) and adds the active cross-channel deference apparatus along four axes. Figure-Ground supplies the prerequisite condition: Perceptual organization of a field into salient figure and receding ground. Lead-and-Support Hierarchy operates against that background: When multiple simultaneous channels carry related content, one channel takes the lead while the others provide coordinated, structurally subordinate support that actively defers to it in prominence, timing, and register, producing a figure-ground hierarchy across the channels. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


Learned helplessness is a kind of learning specialized to a maladaptive content: the durable update an agent acquires is a generalized representation that its actions do not control outcomes. It inherits learning's general commitment that experience produces a durable change in internal state altering future behavior, and adds the specific case where uncontrollable aversive exposure produces a learned non-contingency belief that then suppresses escape attempts even when escape becomes possible — a real learning episode whose acquired model is a wrong, action-suppressing one.

Learned helplessness is a specialization of learning in which the acquired internal capability is a belief that action and outcome are independent.


Learning is a kind of adaptation specialized to an agent's internal cognitive or behavioral capability. Both share the adaptation pattern of modifying internal structure in response to sustained environmental input so that continued functioning under new conditions improves. Learning narrows the substrate to knowledge, skill, model, or behavior held by an agent, and narrows the trigger to experience or information. The broader adaptation prime spans physiological, developmental, and evolutionary modification; learning is the particular case where the modified system is an information-processing agent whose future predictions or performance change as the durable trace of acquisition.

Learning is a specialization of adaptation in which an agent's internal capability is the structure modified in response to experience.


The relation holds only where learning durability uses a distinct fragile-to-stable trace stage; learning without such a stage is excluded.

Learning produces a durable, experience-driven change in an agent's knowledge, capability, model, or behavior. Where that durability is achieved through a newly encoded memory trace, Memory Consolidation is the internal stabilization phase that converts the initially fragile trace into a persistent form capable of affecting later performance. The relation is conditional because some learning mechanisms update behavior or parameters without a separately identifiable fragile-to-stable memory stage.

Memory Consolidation is an internal stabilization phase of Learning when durable change depends on converting a fragile trace into stable memory.


Learning curve effects are a kind of increasing returns specialized to cumulative practice as the state variable: each doubling of cumulative output yields a roughly constant fractional improvement in unit cost, time, or error rate. They inherit the general pattern that the marginal benefit of additional accumulation rises rather than falls, producing self-reinforcing advantage and lock-in for the practitioner, and supply the specific case where the accumulating variable is repetitions performed and the increasing-returns mechanism is acquired skill rather than scale, demand-side adoption, or expectational feedback.

Learning curve effects are a specialization of increasing returns in which unit cost or error rate falls as cumulative experience grows.


Learning curve effects describe the empirical regularity that unit cost, time, or error rate falls predictably with cumulative experience, often following a power law. The pattern is parasitic on actual learning happening: without durable experience-driven self-update of the producing agent's internal capability, repetition would yield no improvement. Learning supplies the underlying durable update mechanism; the learning curve is its aggregate quantitative signature visible in production data. So learning curve effects presuppose learning as the underlying capability change that produces the observable cumulative-volume improvement.

Learning curve effects presuppose learning because the predictable cost decline with cumulative experience is a downstream signature of durable self-update.


The adversary shapes experience or evidence rather than directly writing retained state. A learner must incorporate that substrate and preserve its influence for the later distortion to exist.

Learning-substrate contamination contains a normal learning process whose durable update converts adversarially selected evidence into later behavior.


Legacy integration is the continuity-side particularization of the continuity-versus-rupture dimension: in the face of a discontinuous organizational shift, the practice selectively threads elements of the predecessor system into the successor structure, producing layered continuity rather than clean rupture. Where the parent prime situates change between fully continuous evolution and full discontinuous break, legacy integration specifies the active choice to preserve causal and epistemic continuity across what would otherwise be a sharp organizational boundary.

Legacy integration is the specific shape continuity-vs-rupture takes when accumulated institutional knowledge is selectively preserved across a discontinuous structural change.


Legacy integration presupposes dependency because maintaining practice continuity, institutional knowledge, or cultural identity across discontinuous shifts requires that the new structure be linked to and rely on elements of the prior one. Without dependency's directed reliance relation, the post-rupture system could simply discard the legacy without consequence; legacy integration arises precisely because functions, data, or commitments in the new structure remain bound to artifacts from the old. Dependency supplies the structural couplings that make integration — rather than clean replacement — the operative engineering or organizational choice.

Legacy integration presupposes dependency because preserving institutional knowledge across rupture requires explicit linkage between new and prior systems.


It preserves purpose-relative selection from a richer target and fixes the purpose to observation, comparison, coordination, or control at a distance. The child adds an administrative vantage, standardized categories, an action interface, and characteristic loss of local knowledge.

Legibility is Abstraction specialized to retaining the features a distant actor can compare and act on while discarding heterogeneous local context.


A census, cadastral map, KPI dashboard, schema, or classification is not the target itself but the medium that makes selected target features readable. Remove that target-to-medium mapping and there is no legibility scheme, only direct local familiarity or opaque reality.

Legibility contains a simplified Representation through which the distant actor sees and acts on selected features of the richer target.


Legitimacy presupposes authority because it is defined as a structural property of authority itself — the condition under which those subject to authority voluntarily comply, recognizing it as rightful rather than as bare coercion. Without the prior existence of authority as the capacity to issue binding decisions, there is nothing for legitimacy to qualify. Legitimacy inherits authority's general apparatus of recognized right-to-decide and specializes it by adding the further commitment that compliance flows from acknowledgment of rightfulness — backed by procedural, democratic, performance, traditional, charismatic, or legal sources — rather than from continuous enforcement.

Legitimacy presupposes authority because it names the property by which an authority's commands are treated as rightful rather than merely powerful.


The prime is the specific pathology of an inquiry that YIELDS legitimacy while its findings are structurally insulated from the decision; it presupposes legitimacy as the currency it concerns. 'legitimacy is the currency this prime is about'. Legitimacy supplies the prerequisite condition: Accepted authority. Legitimacy-Yielding Inquiry Insulated from Decision operates against that background: An organisation runs an inquiry, consultation, or review whose nominal purpose is to inform a decision but whose findings are structurally insulated from changing it, so the activity persists because it confers legitimacy rather than because it informs. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


Causality is the structural relation between cause and effect, gated by a productive connection and modal robustness so that variations in the cause produce variations in the effect. Leverage points is the particular shape this relation takes in complex systems where causal influence is highly non-uniform across locations: small changes at certain variables, rules, or paradigm-level commitments produce outsized downstream effects. It is a structurally-particularized instance of causal influence whose specific signature is amplification — disproportionate effect size for a given intervention magnitude — ranked across intervention sites by depth.

Leverage points is the specific shape causality takes when systems have locations where small causes produce disproportionately large effects.


A leverage point is a location where a small change produces disproportionate effects on system trajectory. The mechanism that amplifies small interventions into large outcomes is typically feedback: a reinforcing loop magnifies the change as it cycles, or a balancing loop transmits the change through compensating dynamics that reshape goals or rules. Feedback supplies the closure A-B-A in which the system's output becomes its own input. Leverage operates through such loops in most cases, though some high-leverage paradigm-level interventions act through belief-restructuring without immediate feedback, hence typical.

Leverage points typically presuppose feedback because the disproportionate effect of small interventions runs through reinforcing or balancing loops.


Coordination aligns independently controlled actors so their actions can combine coherently. License as Coordination does so by publishing reusable permission terms in advance, allowing actors to plan and transact against the same rule without negotiating separately with the rights holder.

License as coordination is coordination specialized to aligning independent actors through standing published permissions.


At any proposed output level, every non-substitutable input requirement must be satisfied; a shortfall in any one defeats that level. Liebig's Law specializes the parent by assigning quantities and per-unit requirements to the necessary conditions, making feasible output the minimum supply-to-requirement ratio and causing the binding input to migrate when it is lifted. The distinction is structural, not ecological: both primes transfer across domains, while Liebig fixes the quantitative fixed-proportion production form.

Liebig's Law is the quantitative min-over-complements species of the Anna Karenina Principle's conjunction of necessary conditions.


Each required input imposes a bound on feasible output: output cannot exceed that input's available quantity divided by its per-unit requirement. Their intersection is a constrained feasible region, and the smallest ratio is the active binding constraint. Liebig's Law adds fixed-proportion complementarity, a min-operator, a kinked response, and migration of the active constraint when the current minimum is lifted.

Liebig's Law is Constraint specialized to the binding minimum among non-substitutable complementary inputs.


Life Cycle Assessment presupposes boundary critique because the entire accounting — what counts inside the system and what is externalized — is determined by the goal-and-scope definition phase that sets the system boundary and functional unit. Different boundary choices produce radically different impact totals, so the analysis is conditional on the boundary as drawn. Boundary critique supplies the reflective-framing machinery that surfaces, questions, and renegotiates that choice; without it, LCA results would be presented as objective measurement when they are in fact conditional on an embedded normative-strategic decision about where to cut.

Life Cycle Assessment presupposes boundary critique because its accounting depends on a deliberate, defensible choice of system boundary and functional unit.


LCA quantifies the full environmental burden of a product across raw-material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, use, and end-of-life — requiring that every material and energy flow be linked to the specific stage where it occurred. Traceability supplies exactly the infrastructure that lets any element of a system be linked backward through its history of derivation, origin, and custody. Without traceable flows there is no defensible inventory, no attribution of impacts to stages, and no auditable LCA result. LCA therefore presupposes traceability as the data-substrate on which its accounting depends.

Life cycle assessment presupposes traceability because totaling environmental burden requires linking impacts back to specific upstream stages and flows.


Liminality is the specific shape boundary takes when an actor is suspended in the threshold between a prior and subsequent status, neither fully in nor fully out. The boundary pattern names a demarcation between inside and outside with permeability governing flows; liminality particularizes this by extending the boundary into a dwellable temporal interval in which the demarcation criterion is suspended, ordinary rules do not fully apply, and the actor is ritually or institutionally bracketed. It is the boundary turned into a habitat: ambiguity, plasticity, and communitas are what living-on-the-edge looks like structurally.

Liminality is the specific shape boundary takes in the time dimension, where the threshold itself becomes a marked transitional zone.


Liminality is the threshold state in which an actor is suspended between prior and subsequent statuses, marked by status ambiguity and characteristic dissolution-and-plasticity. The construct is constitutively about being mid-transition: there is a state before, a state after, and a recognized intermediate region between them. State-and-state-transition supplies that architecture, with the additional commitment that transitions are not instantaneous but can occupy an extended state of their own. Without underlying states and transition structure, there would be no before-and-after for liminality to lie between.

Liminality presupposes state and state transition because the threshold middle phase between prior and subsequent statuses requires a state space with transitions.


A heavy-tailed lifetime distribution is the PRIOR the effect requires; Lindy adds the age-conditioned update (survival to age t shifts mass into the tail) the bare distribution does not assert. Presupposes heavy_tailed_distributions. Heavy-Tailed Distributions supplies the prerequisite condition: Distributions where rare, extreme events carry most of the weight. Lindy Effect operates against that background: For entities that do not age, the longer they have already survived, the longer their expected remaining survival becomes. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


Linear Combination inherits Aggregation's many-to-one construction from several inputs. It adds a coefficient for each input, scalar multiplication, addition, a stated weight domain, and the no-interaction invariant. Aggregation also includes maxima, medians, nonlinear roll-ups, and other rules, but every admitted linear combination is an additive weighted aggregation.

Every Linear Combination is aggregation specialized to scaling each input by a weight and adding the results with no interaction terms.


After the mathematics frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of 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. Linear Independence adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: No member of a collection is reproducible as a weighted sum of the others. The parent pattern remains recognizable without that vocabulary, while the child is the framed realization of it. That preservation test establishes decomposition rather than taxonomic subsumption.

Linear Independence is the framed or domain-specific realization of Basis; removing the local frame leaves the parent's structural relation intact.


Linear Combination supplies the prerequisite condition: Scale each of several objects by a weight and add them together. Linear Independence operates against that background: No member of a collection is reproducible as a weighted sum of the others. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.

Linear Independence presupposes Linear Combination, whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


A linear program combines an objective with linear equalities, inequalities, and domain restrictions that delimit its feasible candidates. Those Constraints are internal terms of the full optimization problem alongside its decision variables and objective; the whole program is not itself a single Constraint. Removing the restrictions destroys the polyhedral feasible region and leaves at most an unconstrained linear objective.

Linear Programming contains linear Constraints that define which candidates are feasible.


Linear programming is a specialization of optimization. Specifically, it instantiates the search-for-an-element-maximizing-or-minimizing-an-objective-under-constraints by restricting both objective and constraints to linear functions and allowing continuous decision variables. The decision variables, objective, constraints, and notion of optimality are exactly an optimization quartet; the linear-and-continuous restriction places the problem in a polyhedral geometric setting where optima lie at vertices and the simplex and interior-point algorithms guarantee efficient global solution, distinguishing it within the broader optimization class.

Linear programming is a specialization of optimization with linear objectives, linear constraints, and continuous variables over a polyhedral feasible region.


Linearization-Meaning Mismatch is the species of representational structure mismatch in which a multi-relational source is projected into one serial order whose principle differs from the consumer's reasoning order. Representational Structure Mismatch supplies the genus: A representation preserves its target's elements but misstates one or more task-relevant relations among them, so content can appear complete while its shape licenses the wrong traversal, inference, or action. Linearization-Meaning Mismatch preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Multi-dimensional content forced through a serial channel is ordered by a principle that does not match the one the consumer reasons by. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


This prime is the specific MISMATCH failure-mode of order in serial delivery — order-as-failure where sequencing is order-as-existence. A specialization of sequencing. Sequencing supplies the genus: Deliberately ordering steps under precedence constraints so that the arrangement itself, not just the set of tasks, determines the outcome. Linearization-Meaning Mismatch preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Multi-dimensional content forced through a serial channel is ordered by a principle that does not match the one the consumer reasons by. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


Linguistic universals is the structurally-particularized form invariance takes in the cross-linguistic case: the preserved feature is the named structural property (e.g., "every language distinguishes nouns from verbs"), the transformation group is variation across the ~7,000 languages, and the empirical evidence is the typological sample. It satisfies invariance's joint commitment — what is preserved under which operations — particularized to the case where the operations are inter-linguistic comparison and the invariants are the universals themselves.

Linguistic universals is the specific shape invariance takes when structural properties are preserved across the world's languages.


Liquidity presupposes exchange because the ease and speed with which an asset converts to immediately usable form is a measurement of the exchange channels available — how readily counterparties can be found and conditional transfers consummated without significant loss of value. Without exchange's bilateral-transfer pattern, conversion has no meaning: there is no other party to receive the asset and supply the medium. Exchange supplies the structural substrate; liquidity describes how friction-free that substrate is for a particular asset in a particular context.

Liquidity presupposes exchange because the speed of converting an asset to usable form is a property of the exchange channels available for it.


Liquidity presupposes transaction costs because the friction it measures — the time, price concession, and uncertainty between holding an asset and using it — is itself a species of transaction cost: search for counterparty, negotiation, bid-ask spread, settlement. Without transaction costs as a prior category, the concept of liquidity-as-ease-of-conversion would have nothing to vary against; an asset would either be cash or not, with no intermediate gradient. Liquidity inherits the transaction-cost framework and specializes it to the cost of monetization, making it the inverse measure of friction along the convert-to-cash dimension.

Liquidity presupposes transaction costs because the friction it measures is precisely the cost of converting an asset into usable form.


The recurrent active-but-stalled state is constituted by outputs from each participant feeding back as inputs to the other; without that response loop there may be delay or blockage, but not livelock.

Livelock contains a coupled feedback loop in which each responsive move elicits the compensating move that sustains non-progress.


Load balancing is the particularization of allocation to a setting where the limited supply is the aggregate capacity of a pool of interchangeable units and the competing claimants are increments of a divisible workload. Where allocation names the bare assignment of finite supply to competing demands generally, load balancing fixes the structural features: the resources are substitutable in parallel, the demands are stream-like increments that can be split, and the assignment rule routes each increment to wherever spare capacity exists.

Load balancing is the specific shape allocation takes when divisible work is assigned across substitutable units of parallel capacity.


Load balancing is a canonical specific resource-allocation technique (distributing work across capacity) within the broader resource management discipline. Resource Management supplies the genus: Allocation of finite assets. Load Balancing preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Distributing work across resources so none is overloaded. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


The loading regime is meaningful only for a stock whose level changes by accumulated inflow minus outflow. The temporary excess input closes the initial stock deficit; once the target is reached, only the replacement of ongoing outflow remains.

A loading dose presupposes a stock that accumulates net inflow, because the initial excess input exists to fill that stock faster than the maintenance inflow can.


The defining contrast between loading and maintenance requires a target operating state in which ordinary inflow balances loss. Without that steady target, there is no principled point at which the exceptional initial input should fall to a maintenance rate. Loading Dose is not a kind of Bootstrapping: it needs neither self-produced stages nor recursive construction from its own outputs.

A loading dose presupposes a target steady operating range whose balancing maintenance input is smaller than the temporary loading input.


A scoped-delegation, decide-at-lowest-competent-level specialization of the inner/outer-authority relation — a kind-of autonomy. Autonomy supplies the genus: 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. Local Autonomy & Tiered Escalation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Escalate when needed. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


Local autonomy with tiered escalation presupposes delegation of authority because the principle of resolving issues at the lowest competent tier requires that decision-making power be formally assigned downward, with specified limits and reserved escalation pathways back upward. Without delegation's apparatus -- principal-agent assignment, defined scope, accountability mechanisms -- there is no lower competent level to hold the decision and no procedure for escalating when scope exceeds local capacity. Subsidiarity is delegation patterned by competence-band rather than by hierarchy alone. Delegation of Authority supplies the prerequisite condition: Assign responsibility. Local Autonomy & Tiered Escalation operates against that background: Escalate when needed. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.

Local autonomy with tiered escalation presupposes delegation of authority because resolving issues at the lowest competent level requires authority distributed downward with reserved escalation paths.


'Optimization is the ACTIVITY of which a local optimum is a failure MODE.' A local optimum presupposes a value landscape under improvement search — it is the trap the optimization search falls into. Optimization supplies the prerequisite condition: Finds best solution under constraints. Local Optimum operates against that background: A point best within its neighborhood but not across the whole landscape. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


A local_optimum is one POINT (where local search halts) on the landscape; the optimization landscape is the whole country (basins, ridges, plateaus, connectivity). Part-to-whole — landscape is the broader frame. Optimization Landscape supplies the genus: The topology of a value function over a configuration space, whose shape predicts which search strategies will succeed or get stuck. Local Optimum preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A point best within its neighborhood but not across the whole landscape. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


Local-to-Global Aggregation supplies the genus: Locally checkable properties promote to a global verdict under an explicit aggregation discipline. Local Sequence Legality preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: The acceptability of an arrangement of units drawn from a finite inventory is decided by local constraints over short windows of context, prior to and independent of higher-level interpretation, so global legality is the composition of local verdicts. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.

Local Sequence Legality is a specialization of Local-to-Global Aggregation, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Locality of reference presupposes heavy-tailed distributions because the empirical regularity that a small slowly-drifting working set absorbs the vast majority of accesses is a heavy-tailed access-frequency distribution: a few addresses account for most references while the bulk receive almost none. Without heavy tails' signature of a few extremes dominating sums and averages, locality reduces to uniform access. The working-set phenomenon, page-fault rates, and cache-hit predictions all rest on the same skewed distribution heavy-tailed analysis describes. Heavy-Tailed Distributions supplies the prerequisite condition: Distributions where rare, extreme events carry most of the weight. Locality Of Reference operates against that background: Accesses cluster in time and space, making prediction and caching effective. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.

Locality of reference presupposes heavy-tailed distributions because clustered access patterns produce heavy-tailed access frequencies across the address space.


Locality of reference is a specialization of recurrence: it asserts that access events reappear across time (temporal locality: recently-used items return soon) and space (spatial locality: items near a used one are used next). It inherits recurrence's structural commitment that patterns reappear with predictable spacing, particularized to the access-distribution domain. The working-set phenomenon is precisely the autocorrelated-recurrence signature in which past usage predicts future usage at non-uniform rates.

Locality of reference is a kind of recurrence in which recently or nearby accessed items reappear with predictable frequency.


Spatial indexing exploits locality of reference (the access-pattern property) for its output-sensitive payoff. After the computer_science frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Spatial Indexing: Organizing items by position in a space so retrieval, neighborhood, and range queries become geometric and output-sensitive. Locality Of Reference adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: Accesses cluster in time and space, making prediction and caching effective. The parent pattern remains recognizable without that vocabulary, while the child is the framed realization of it. That preservation test establishes decomposition rather than taxonomic subsumption.


Located_in is a relation but the specific mereotopological within-a-region-at-a-time relation with its own inference rules (no transitivity into parthood, time-indexed, non-constitutive) the generic relation lacks. Relation supplies the genus: Describes associations or dependencies. Located-In Relation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: One entity is situated within the region of another at a time, without that entity being a part of, or strictly contained by, the location. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


Lock-in is the state in which the forward-looking cost of switching from a current commitment exceeds the cost of continuing, because investment, learning, network growth, or standard adoption has accumulated value that does not transfer to alternatives. This accumulation is precisely the increasing-returns pattern: marginal benefit rising as the cumulative state variable grows, with each successive unit making the option more attractive. Without increasing returns supplying the rising-advantage curve, no asymmetry would build between the current commitment and clean-slate alternatives, and lock-in would not arise.

Lock-in presupposes increasing returns because the accumulating non-transferable value that makes switching costly is the increasing-returns mechanism.


Lock-in is a specialization of path dependence. The general pattern is that outcomes depend on the specific historical trajectory of choices, with past decisions foreclosing alternatives and accumulating constraints. Lock-in instantiates this with a particular structural form: history is encoded as accumulated non-transferable value such that, from the present, the cost of switching exceeds the cost of continuing with the suboptimal commitment. It is path dependence with the specific signature that the path's encoded constraints are forward-cost-binding rather than merely contingent.

Lock-in is a specific kind of path dependence where past commitments make the present forward cost of switching exceed continuation.


Lock_in is the TERMINAL committed state a ratchet climbs toward (staircase-to-landing); the ratchet is the incremental process of cheap captured advances. Lower confidence than the path_dependence parent. Ratchet Effect supplies the genus: Direction-asymmetric coupling plus a locking element produces accumulating one-way displacement under bidirectional forcing. Lock-In preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Forward-looking cost of switching exceeds the forward-looking cost of staying, even when a superior alternative exists. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


Log encoding is a representational CHOICE — re-expressing a wide-dynamic-range magnitude on a log axis so equal internal steps mean equal ratios; the commitment lives in the axis (the representation), not the data. is-a representation, specialized to ratio-scale re-encoding under wide range + proportional importance.


Logging is the append-only, event-time, deferred-reading mechanism that makes a system's internal history externally inspectable — it presupposes/serves observability (infer internal state externally), as its retrospective record-now-interpret-later instance. Observability supplies the prerequisite condition: Infer internal state externally. Logging operates against that background: Record events as they occur, append-only, for inspection after the fact. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


The logistic equation is distinguished from exponential growth by a finite K that the trajectory approaches asymptotically. Boundedness supplies the fixed finite envelope; Logistic Growth adds endogenous growth, a multiplicative remaining-fraction brake, two fixed points, and a sigmoid time path.

Logistic Growth presupposes a finite ceiling that bounds the trajectory and supplies the remaining-capacity term in its multiplicative brake.


Growth proportional to the current quantity supplies reinforcing feedback; proximity to the finite ceiling supplies a multiplicative balancing feedback. Their conjunction produces takeoff, inflection, and decelerating saturation, while Feedback alone commits to neither a ceiling nor a logistic form.

Logistic Growth contains the coupled positive engine and negative ceiling brake whose loop interaction produces its sigmoid trajectory.


Bottleneck supplies the genus: The single limiting stage that caps an entire system's throughput. Logistics Overreach preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: An operating front advances faster than the trailing supply line that sustains it, and because the lengthening line itself consumes delivery, beyond a crossover point further advance strands what has already advanced rather than extending reach. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.

Logistics Overreach is typically a specialization of Bottleneck, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Loss and damage operates on a pre-existing risk exposure — it is the post-defense slice of a threat distribution. Presupposes risk; the 0.88 escape_and_leakage neighbor is the scope-narrower sibling, not the parent.


Asymmetry names the structural property of a relation whose two sides are not interchangeable — swap the positions and something changes. Loss aversion is the specific shape this pattern takes around a reference point in the value function: subjective weight on a loss of size x exceeds the weight on a gain of the same size by a factor of roughly 1.5 to 2.5, producing a kinked value function. It is a structurally-particularized instance of directed imbalance whose specific diagnostic is the failed swap-test between gain frame and loss frame at the reference point.

Loss aversion is the specific shape asymmetry takes in value perception, where losses weigh more heavily than equivalent gains.


Loss aversion is a kind of preference specialized by a reference-dependent, asymmetric value function: outcomes below the reference point are coded as losses and weighted more heavily than equivalent gains above it. It inherits preference's general commitment to an ordering over a choice set on an evaluative dimension, and supplies the specific case where the evaluative dimension is gain/loss relative to a reference point and the ordering relation systematically privileges loss avoidance — producing reproducible deviations from expected-utility predictions in framing, endowment pricing, and status-quo bias.

Loss aversion is a specialization of preference in which the ordering is reference-dependent and weighs losses more than equivalent gains.


Loss aversion is reference-point dependence specialized by a value function whose loss-side response is steeper than its gain-side response. Both evaluate outcomes as signed departures from a movable baseline and predict changed valuation when that baseline moves while the outcome is held fixed. Loss aversion requires unequal weighting, with negative departures exerting more influence than equal positive departures; reference-point dependence alone is silent on slope symmetry.


Mach's principle presupposes frame of reference because its relational claim about inertia is precisely a claim about which frames count as inertial: in the Machian view, the local inertial frame is determined by the distribution of matter rather than by an absolute space. Without the prior availability of a frame of reference as a chosen coordinate system relative to which accelerations are defined, there is nothing for matter to fix and no question of what makes a frame non-accelerating. Frame supplies the structural slot that Mach's principle fills with a relational determinant.

Mach's principle presupposes frame of reference because relational inertia requires that what counts as non-accelerating be defined by a frame fixed by matter.


Mach's Principle holds that inertia is not intrinsic to a body but arises from its relation to the total matter distribution in the universe, so a body's resistance to acceleration is co-constituted by the very cosmos that includes it. That is a specialization of reflexivity: the system's behavior is determined by a structural feature in which the system is itself embedded, so the body's inertial state is set by a whole it is part of and acts back upon, instantiating the self-referential coupling that defines reflexivity.

Mach's Principle is a kind of reflexivity: a body's inertia is shaped by the total mass distribution it is itself part of.


Mach's principle presupposes relation because its entire claim is that inertia is not intrinsic to a body but arises from how the body stands in association with the rest of the universe's matter. Without the prior availability of a well-defined association-between-elements that can hold across distance and configuration, there is nothing for inertial structure to depend on. Relation supplies the general apparatus of specifying which entities stand together under a designated link; Mach's principle imports that apparatus and asserts that the inertial link is the one that constitutes mass.

Mach's principle presupposes relation because it grounds inertia in a body's relation to the total matter distribution.


Maintenance is the sustained activity of preserving intended function against entropy, wear, and environmental change — working ahead of catastrophic failure. The activity presupposes that there is a specifiable intended function with characteristic variables that drift under degradation and corrective actions that return those variables toward acceptable bands. Homeostasis supplies that architecture: sensor-comparator-actuator closure that holds key variables within bands against disturbance. Without an underlying homeostatic loop tracking system state against a reference, maintenance has no target condition to preserve and no signal of drift to act on.

Maintenance presupposes homeostasis because sustaining intended function against entropy and wear requires a regulating mechanism tracking variables against bands.


Maintenance_rehearsal is the STRICT SUBSET of maintenance whose only intervention is bare re-assertion (no repair/replace/upgrade), carrying two load-bearing inequalities (refresh-period<decay-period, refresh-cost<<storage-cost) the parent does not name. Maintenance supplies the genus: Sustained preventive work that keeps a system's intended function intact against inevitable degradation, acting ahead of failure rather than repairing after it. Maintenance Rehearsal preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Holding a decay-prone state above its disappearance threshold by repeated low-cost refresh actions that re-assert it without enriching or moving it. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


This prime is 'a specific, diagnosable pathology of aggregation' — an additive/expected-value objective whose mass concentrates on a skewed majority so the optimum is minority-blind by construction. It presupposes the aggregation operation (the average revealed as a weighting) and names its failure mode. Aggregation supplies the prerequisite condition: Deliberately collapsing many items into a single summary, choosing which information to discard to gain tractability. Majority-Dominated Aggregate Objective operates against that background: An aggregate objective whose mass lies with the majority systematically underweights an operationally important minority. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


Every managed retreat deliberately yields a no-longer-worth-holding position so resources and exposure can be reorganized around a defensible retained core. It adds the rising defense-cost trajectory, an explicit threshold, voluntary prior timing, a chosen new boundary, a sequenced migration, and support for parties exposed by the contraction.

Managed retreat is sacrificing peripheral ground to defend a retained core, specialized to planned withdrawal before a rising defense-cost trajectory closes the option.


Mandatory versus default norms is the specific shape constraint takes when the rule system distinguishes binding restrictions that cannot be waived from those that apply unless overridden. The constraint structure -- a condition that restricts the admissible set, binding for the purpose at hand -- splits into two operative modes: mandatory rules where the restriction holds absolutely, and default rules where the restriction is overrideable by explicit modification. The distinction operationalizes choice-architecture: which constraints are hard floors versus which are flexible-but-sticky starting points.

Mandatory versus default norms is the specific shape constraint takes when rules are sorted by whether they can or cannot be opted out of.


Maneuver is the action of changing position in a value-graded state space. Positional Advantage is the value conferred by the favorable position reached: leverage, reach, defensibility, or optionality that arises from location rather than force at the point. That realized advantage is an internal term of the maneuver's full signature, not the taxonomic genus of the repositioning act. Remove the value differential and the move becomes mere relocation rather than maneuver.

Maneuver contains Positional Advantage as the value realized by occupying the better position reached by the move.


'A manifold ADDS to a topological space the crucial extra: a system of local flat charts glued by smooth transition maps. Every manifold has an underlying topology, but topology alone is not a manifold.' Manifold presupposes topology and adds chart structure. Topology supplies the prerequisite condition: Studies properties preserved under deformation. Manifold operates against that background: A space that is locally flat but globally curved or topologically non-trivial. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


Role capture is 'a species of' the agency problem — the specific, sharp case where the agent's reward gradient points toward SUSTAINING the problem the role exists to remove, plus the covert-manufacture commitment and counterfactual-demand signature. agency_problem is the genus. Agency Problem supplies the genus: Misaligned incentives. Manufactured Dependency for Role Capture preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: An agent covertly sustains a problem to keep occupying the valued role attached to solving it. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


Margin of safety is a specialization of reserve in which the surplus is the explicit, quantified gap between the system's nominal expected demand and its maximum permissible limit, sized to absorb modeling uncertainty without crossing the failure threshold. It inherits reserve's general structure of deliberately held capacity available for variation or shock, and specializes by fixing the form to an engineered ratio, percentage, or absolute clearance and the justification to the consequences of failure. It renders designer uncertainty as explicit margin rather than implicit optimism, making robustness a quantitative design parameter.

Margin of safety is a specialization of reserve in which the surplus is the quantitative gap between expected demand and the system's failure threshold.


Marginal analysis evaluates decisions by comparing the incremental cost and benefit of small changes, with the canonical result that at an interior optimum marginal benefit equals marginal cost. The whole technique presupposes an optimization problem in place — an objective being maximized or minimized over a choice set subject to constraints. Optimization supplies the well-defined search for the best element; marginal analysis presupposes that search and provides the calculus-based first-order-condition method that locates interior optima. Without an optimization target, the marginal calculation has nothing to characterize.

Marginal analysis presupposes optimization because the incremental comparison of costs and benefits is the first-order-condition apparatus of finding optima.


Marginal analysis is incremental reasoning that compares the marginal cost and marginal benefit of small changes to characterize optima. Marginal utility is the particular shape this analysis takes on the consumption side: the partial derivative of a utility function with respect to one good — the additional welfare gained from one more unit — holding others fixed. It is a structurally-particularized instance of marginal reasoning whose specific quantity is the utility-function partial, providing the consumer-side magnitude that gets equated to price ratios at the optimum.

Marginal utility is the specific shape marginal analysis takes when the incremental quantity is the additional satisfaction from one more unit consumed.


Marginal utility presupposes preference because it is formally the partial derivative of the agent's utility function with respect to one good, and that utility function exists only as a representation of the agent's preference ordering over consumption bundles. Without preference as the underlying ordering on the choice set, there is no utility function whose marginal change can be measured, no trade-off rate, and no scarce-budget allocation problem. Preference supplies the ordering primitive; marginal utility is the local rate at which moving along that ordering changes value as quantity changes.

Marginal utility presupposes preference because the additional satisfaction from one more unit is a derivative of the agent's preference-grounded utility function.


Markedness is the structurally-particularized form asymmetry takes in linguistic oppositions: the two sides of a binary contrast (singular/plural, voiced/voiceless, present/past) fail the swap-test — one is privileged as default (shorter, more frequent, broader distribution) while the other carries specifying morphology. It inherits asymmetry's directed-imbalance structure and particularizes it to the formal opposition where the privileged side is the morphologically simpler default and the marked side is the specified specialization.

Markedness is the specific shape asymmetry takes when a linguistic opposition designates one member as unmarked default and the other as marked.


The blanket is a boundary, but a specific testable one — exactly the minimal set whose observation renders interior conditionally independent of exterior, with a screening test and minimality criterion attached. A specialization of boundary. Boundary supplies the genus: Defines system limits. Markov Blanket preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: The minimal set of variables that, once observed, render a target conditionally independent of everything else — the system's statistical interface with its environment. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


A Markov Decision Process formalizes sequential choice as the selection, at each state, of an action that commits future trajectory and forecloses alternatives. Its solution concept is a policy that picks actions from a feasible set under uncertainty and trade-off. That apparatus is meaningless without Decision as the underlying act: MDPs presuppose the existence of an agent that selects one alternative from a set under constraint, then assemble probability and reward structure around that primitive.

Markov Decision Processes presuppose Decision: an MDP is machinery for selecting policies, which are decision rules over states.


An MDP's transition kernel P(s' | s, a) is a calibrated probability assignment over next states, and its optimality criterion is expected cumulative discounted reward. Both depend on Probability's apparatus — numerical measures obeying additivity, normalization, and conditioning — to combine uncertain outcomes coherently. Without probability the kernel collapses to an unspecified relation and expectation has no meaning, so the MDP framework cannot be stated or solved except as a structure built on top of probability.

Markov Decision Processes presuppose Probability: the transition kernel and expected-reward objective are defined as probabilistic objects.


An MDP is the tuple (S, A, P, R, γ) specifying states, actions, a stochastic transition kernel, rewards, and a discount factor — with the Markov property that next-state depends only on current state and action. The framework directly instantiates the state-and-state-transition architecture: state space, transition relation, and history-compressed-into-state. Without that underlying state-machine substrate, there would be no S over which P could be a kernel and no Markov closure on which policy optimization depends. MDPs add actions and rewards atop the bare state-transition structure.

Markov Decision Processes presupposes state and state transition because the MDP tuple is built on a state space with Markov-property transitions.


A Markov process presupposes probability because its defining apparatus — a transition rule giving the conditional distribution of the next state given the present — is itself a probability assignment obeying additivity, normalization, and conditioning. Without probability's coherence rules quantifying uncertainty over sample spaces, the memorylessness claim (future is independent of past given present) would have no content: the screening-off relation is precisely a conditional-independence statement that lives inside the probabilistic framework Kolmogorov axiomatized.

A Markov process presupposes probability because the transition rule is specified as conditional probabilities over a sample space of next states.


A Markov process is defined by the memorylessness property: the future evolution is conditionally independent of the entire past given the current state. This commitment is meaningful only against a state-and-state-transition substrate — a state space and a transition rule. The Markov property is precisely the closure condition the state-transition framework already invokes as the principle that history is compressed into state. The Markov process makes this closure stochastic and rigorous, but it presupposes the underlying state-transition architecture as its operational ground.

Markov process presupposes state and state transition because the memorylessness property operates on a state space with transition rules.


Stochastic Process supplies the genus: A quantity indexed (usually by time) whose evolution is governed by randomness — an indexed family of random variables sharing one probability law. Markov Process preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Future state depends only on the present, not the full history. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.

Markov Process is a specialization of Stochastic Process, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Mass is a specialized allocation move: concentrate a finite resource at a decisive point against a threshold-shaped response curve, rather than spread it evenly. It is allocation (assign limited supply) plus a response-curve-shape bet + locator + vulnerability cost. Sibling of economy_of_force under allocation.


Mastery learning is a specialization of pedagogy whose distinctive move is inverting the conventional time-fixed model: it holds the achievement standard constant at a high threshold and lets time, feedback, and instructional support vary so that no learner advances with persistent deficits. It inherits pedagogy's commitment to deliberately structuring the learner's encounter with content for durable capability change, and adds the specific architecture of diagnostic formative assessment, immediate remediation, and alternative paths organized around an unconditional unit-by-unit mastery requirement.

Mastery learning is a specific pedagogy that fixes the achievement threshold and varies time and support until every learner meets it.


Well-Foundedness (Well-Ordering) supplies the prerequisite condition: Prevents infinite descent. Mathematical Induction operates against that background: Proof method across natural numbers. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.

Mathematical Induction presupposes Well-Foundedness (Well-Ordering), whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


Maturity mismatch is the TEMPORAL dimension of coupling between two sides of a system — how fast each can respond — a specialized two-clock duration-ratio coupling. itself contrasts it with bare coupling (strength) as the temporal specialization. Coupling supplies the genus: Interdependence among subsystems. Maturity Mismatch preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A system holds two-sided commitments whose durations differ — a short side that must be repeatedly refreshed against a long side that cannot accelerate — so it fails when refreshing stops, not because it lacks resources but because they are locked in durations longer than the moment requires. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


Every Measure maps a potentially many-element subset to one retained feature, its size, while suppressing the subset's remaining granular structure. It therefore satisfies Aggregation's many-to-one collapse. Measure adds a base space, an admissible family of subsets, non-negativity, empty-set zero, and countable additivity over disjoint parts. Medians, maxima, votes, and nonlinear roll-ups show why Aggregation is broader, not why any Measure falls outside it.

A Measure is aggregation specialized to collapsing every admissible subset to a non-negative size under countable additivity over disjoint parts.


Every Measure begins with a base set, a family of its subsets closed under the required set operations, and a rule assigning size to each admissible subset. Without elements, membership, subsets, complement, and union, neither the σ-algebra nor countable additivity can be stated. Set and Membership is therefore a constitutive dependency, not merely a frequent implementation.

Measure strictly presupposes Set and Membership because its domain is an admissible family of subsets of a base set.


Measurement and disturbance presupposes observability because the disturbance-versus-information trade-off is intelligible only relative to observability's framing: a measurement is supposed to recover internal state, and disturbance is the systematic alteration the measurement coupling imposes on that state. Without observability's commitment to reconstructing state from outputs, there is no baseline against which to count the back-action as systematic perturbation of the inference target. The disturbance is a structural cost paid against the observability budget.

Measurement and disturbance presupposes observability because the back-action perturbation matters only against the standard of inferring true internal state from outputs.


Measurement and disturbance names the structural challenge that every measurement couples the system to an apparatus and thereby alters what is being measured, producing a trade-off between information gained and disturbance incurred. This presupposes uncertainty: the structural condition of incomplete knowledge about a system's state, with the commitment to distinguish what is known from what is not. The measurement act is a controlled reduction of epistemic uncertainty that introduces new uncertainty about the perturbed state. Without uncertainty's framing of incomplete knowledge as the target of inquiry, there is no information-versus-disturbance trade-off to characterize.

Measurement and disturbance presupposes uncertainty because the trade-off between information gained and disturbance incurred is fundamentally an uncertainty-management problem.


Measurement's own structural signature names the uncertainty envelope as one of its seven constituent links; measurement is the whole that decomposes into this part. After the statistics_experimental_design frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Measurement: Mapping a target's attribute onto a scale via an instrument and procedure, yielding a value-plus-uncertainty tied to a unit and frame. Measurement Uncertainty and Observational Noise adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: Measurement noise arises from instrument and observation limits. The parent pattern remains recognizable without that vocabulary, while the child is the framed realization of it. That preservation test establishes decomposition rather than taxonomic subsumption.


Measurement uncertainty and observational noise presuppose observability because they name the irreducible gap between a system's true internal state and what external measurements can recover. Observability frames the question -- can internal state be inferred from outputs over time -- and noise is the corruption layer between state and output that degrades that inference. Without the observability framing of state-versus-output, there is no canonical 'true value' against which instrument precision, observer error, and environmental variation count as displacement; noise becomes meaningful only as deviation from the inferable signal.

Measurement uncertainty and observational noise presuppose observability because they characterize the gap between true state and what outputs reveal about it.


Mediator availability constraint is the bottleneck-particularized commitment for systems that depend on expert mediation: the scarce resource is expert time per learner, and the slowest stage in the learning pipeline is the mentoring or feedback step. Where bottleneck names the single binding capacity limit governing aggregate throughput generally, the mediator variant fixes the identity of the limiting element as human expert capacity, with the structural consequence that scaling material resources does not relieve the constraint.

Mediator availability constraint is the specific shape a bottleneck takes when expert mentorship or authoritative feedback is the scarce stage capping system throughput.


Logging records temporally ordered, context-bearing events when they occur for deferred inspection. Memoing inherits that whole structure and narrows the recorded events to interpretations, alternatives, decisions, doubts, and frame shifts arising while a separate artifact is produced. Its parallel-artifact placement, signal filter, and emphasis on why are the differentia; they do not change the underlying record-now/read-later genus.

Memoing is event-time durable logging specialized to the reasoning trajectory that produces a parallel primary artifact.


The memory palace is a specialization of schema in which the schema deployed is specifically a familiar spatial route, with its sequenced locations providing pre-built slots into which items-to-remember are imaginatively placed. It inherits the general schema commitment of a type-level cognitive structure with slots, default values, and expected relations that scaffold encoding and retrieval. Its specialization is to fix the schema's slots to spatial locations along a well-known path and to bind discrete content through vivid multisensory associations that exploit the route's pre-existing organization.

The memory palace is a specialization of schema in which the spatial schema of a familiar route serves as a structured scaffold for binding items to locations.


A mental model is a specialization of representation in which the medium is an individual reasoner's internal cognitive structure and the target is some domain whose behavior must be predicted, explained, or intervened upon. It inherits representation's commitment to selective faithfulness — preserving the entities and causal rules that matter while dropping detail — and specializes by locating the medium in working memory and requiring tractability for mental simulation. The model is held by a particular mind, revisable on prediction failure, and supports the characteristic what-if running that distinguishes it from external representations.

A mental model is a specialization of representation in which the medium is an individual reasoner's internal cognitive structure.


The mere exposure effect is the empirical pattern that repeated encounters with a stimulus produce positive attitudinal change, with liking growing roughly logarithmically in the number of exposures. The phenomenon presupposes recurrence as its enabling structure: a single one-shot encounter cannot produce the effect. Recurrence — the structural property by which a pattern or event reappears across instances, often with predictable spacing — is exactly what the repetition counts on. The dose-response curve operates on the recurrence pattern, so mere exposure cannot function without reappearance as its substrate.

The mere exposure effect presupposes recurrence because the liking shift only emerges after a stimulus reappears across multiple encounters.


Message passing enforces modular boundaries — autonomous private state interacting only through interfaces is modular decoupling realized. Modularity supplies the prerequisite condition: Breaks systems into smaller units. Message Passing operates against that background: Autonomous holders of private state interact only through discrete addressed messages over intermediating channels. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


Meta-symbolic reflection is the structurally-particularized form reflexivity takes in the symbolic-cognitive case: the system's self-referential apparatus is a symbol system (language, code, logic, notation) that turns its own syntax into an object of reference, often using the same system reflexively. It inherits reflexivity's structural pattern — observations or models of the system become inputs shaping the system — particularized to the case where the loop runs through symbolic self-reference rather than empirical feedback.

Meta-symbolic reflection is the specific shape reflexivity takes when a symbol system is used to refer to and analyze itself.


Metacognition is built on a self-monitoring-and-regulation feedback loop over the agent's own cognitive processes. Feedback supplies the prerequisite condition: Outputs influence inputs. Metacognition operates against that background: Awareness of thinking processes. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


Metacognition is the specific shape reflexivity takes when the system is a cognitive agent and the self-referential operation is thinking about one's own thinking — second-order representations of first-order cognitive acts that feed back to regulate them. Reflexivity supplies the underlying pattern: a system's observations or models of itself become inputs that shape its own behavior, creating a self-referential loop. Metacognition is a structurally-particularized instance: the loop runs through cognitive monitoring and control, where awareness of one's own performance regulates subsequent processing — strategy choice, study allocation, help-seeking.

Metacognition is the specific shape reflexivity takes when a cognitive system represents and regulates its own cognitive processes.


Analogy is the general pattern of structural mapping between two domains in which relational roles align so that inferences in the source become candidate inferences in the target. Metaphor is the specific case in which the source domain is typically concrete and embodied, the target is typically abstract, and the mapping organizes how the target can be thought about and talked about at all. It inherits analogy's relational-alignment machinery but commits additionally to constitutive cognitive-linguistic projection — a specialization of analogy applied to thought and discourse.

Metaphor is a specialization of analogy; it is structural mapping from a source to a target domain in language and conceptual thought.


Visual-artistic metaphor is a specialization of metaphor in which the cross-domain mapping is carried by visual form, imagery, or compositional relation rather than by linguistic expression. It inherits metaphor's general structure of importing selected relations and inferences from a source domain into a target domain to support reasoning, communication, or perception, and specializes by fixing the medium of the mapping to visual transfer: one visual form stands for or illuminates another through perceived similarity, structural correspondence, or cultural convention. The conceptual content travels through the image rather than through the word.

Visual-artistic metaphor is a specialization of metaphor in which the source and target are mapped through visual form rather than language.


Adaptation supplies the genus: Systems adjust to conditions. Metaplasticity preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A system's capacity to change is itself modulated by prior activity, so a slow second-order process governs how readily the fast first-order adaptive process can operate. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.

Metaplasticity is a specialization of Adaptation, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Metastability is a local optimum in a dynamical/energy landscape held by a kinetic barrier, satisfying local_optimum's neighborhood-best-not-global-best definition. Local Optimum supplies the genus: A point best within its neighborhood but not across the whole landscape. Metastability preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A system persists in a locally stable configuration that is not the global optimum, held there by a barrier that routine disturbances cannot clear. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


A metasystem transition is the structurally-particularized form emergence takes when independent or loosely-coupled subsystems coordinate through a new integrating mechanism (genetic code, nervous system, social hierarchy, market institution), producing higher-level properties impossible at the prior level. It satisfies emergence's four-part specification — lower-level constituents, higher-level phenomenon, sense of novelty, conditions — particularized by the additional commitment that integration produces a new control hierarchy rather than just a new descriptive vocabulary.

A metasystem transition is the specific shape emergence takes when previously autonomous subsystems become integrated under a new level of control.


Metonymy is 'the specific sub-mechanism' of standing-for licensed by ATTACHMENT/contiguity rather than resemblance or arbitrary convention — a species of symbolic_representation (the genus). Add symbolic_representation as parent. Symbolic Representation supplies the genus: Sign-meaning link sustained by collective convention rather than resemblance or causal connection. Metonymy preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Referring to a thing via a contiguous element attached to it — part, locale, instrument, institution, address — with the substitution valid only while the contiguity holds. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


A Metric is definitionally a single-valued function from pairs in a set to non-negative real numbers. It inherits Function Mapping's domain, codomain, and determinate input-output rule, then adds identity of indiscernibles, symmetry, and the triangle inequality. Functions with other domains, codomains, or constraints show only that Function Mapping is broader.

Every Metric is a Function Mapping from ordered pairs of objects to non-negative real distances, with metric axioms added.


Microhistory vs. macrohistory is the specific shape scale takes in historical inquiry, where the band of analysis ranges from a single village, trial, or household over a short span (microhistory) to civilizational processes across long durations and wide geographies (macrohistory). It is a structurally-particularized instance of the recognition that properties and patterns vary with scale, with the added commitment that contingency, agency, and texture are visible at the micro band while structural regularities and long-run trends are visible at the macro band, and that neither scale dominates — they make different features available.

Microhistory vs. macrohistory is the specific shape scale takes when historical inquiry varies its resolution between bounded subjects and sweeping processes.


This is not subsumption: Microstructure names the load-bearing intermediate arrangement, while Emergence names the higher-level novelty it explains. Nevertheless, the part-interaction-to-macro-property core is universal to the prime.

Removing substrate vocabulary from Microstructure leaves lower-level parts whose meso-scale relations generate macro properties not fixed by composition alone.


The prime is not a kind of magnitude. Scale supplies the relative observation regimes needed to locate its subject; Microstructure adds arrangement, processing history, macro-property mediation, and composition-held-fixed counterfactuals.

Microstructure requires distinguishable constituent, intermediate, and bulk scales so the mediating arrangement is neither part inventory nor gross form.


Lewis's minimal-modification rule is a constraint governing how counterfactual scenarios are constructed within counterfactual reasoning, a component not a kind. Counterfactual Reasoning supplies the prerequisite condition: Hypothetical alternatives. Minimal Modification Principle operates against that background: Preserve true facts when constructing alternative scenarios. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


The minimal modification principle presupposes counterfactuals because it is a constraint on how to construct and evaluate counterfactual scenarios: vary only the antecedent and preserve as many actual facts as possible. Without the prior commitment to reason about "if A had been the case, then B would have followed" claims by comparing the actual world to relevantly-altered alternatives, there is nothing for the minimality requirement to discipline. The principle supplies the closeness ordering that makes counterfactual evaluation tractable rather than degenerating into unbounded reimagining.

The minimal modification principle presupposes counterfactuals because it constrains which counterfactual scenarios are legitimate by requiring closeness to actuality.


The minimal modification principle presupposes modal reasoning because it operates over a structured space of alternative possibilities — the closest possible worlds Lewis analyzed — selecting which alternatives are admissible when an antecedent is varied. Without the modal apparatus that introduces operators quantifying over accessible alternatives, there would be no space of counterfactual worlds in which to apply the minimality criterion. The principle is precisely a constraint on the accessibility ordering that modal semantics requires.

The minimal modification principle presupposes modal reasoning because it constrains which alternative possible worlds count as legitimate counterfactual scenarios.


A minimal pair is 'a comparison engineered so that exactly one feature differs', which upgrades difference-noting into causal attribution — a specialization of comparison. Comparison supplies the genus: Place items in a shared frame along chosen dimensions to read off a relation between them. Minimal Pairs preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Hold everything constant except one feature, observe whether the output changes, and attribute the difference to that feature. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


Abstraction is the purpose-relative retention of structure: keeping what is load-bearing for a use and discarding what is not. Minimalism is the particular shape this pattern takes when the principle of selection is positive elimination — fewer colors, fewer steps, fewer words — chosen to heighten clarity or potency rather than to under-specify. It inherits abstraction's selective-retention move and adds the commitment that reduction itself is constitutive of value. A structurally-particularized instance of abstraction whose specific selection principle is necessity through deliberate elimination.

Minimalism is the specific shape abstraction takes when the retention principle is reduction to the essential by elimination of the inessential.


Minimalism is the deliberate elimination of everything inessential, which operates as a binding restriction on the admissible set of design moves: ornamental, redundant, or non-load-bearing elements are forbidden from inclusion. Without constraint's machinery of treating a binding restriction as a first-class structural object, there would be no structural difference between an under-specified design and a minimalist one. Minimalism is the active imposition of a necessity-only restriction on the design space, deploying constraint's binding-restriction structure as an aesthetic and functional discipline.

Minimalism presupposes constraint because its disciplined stripping-away operates as a binding restriction on what counts as admissible in the design.


Minimalism in art is a specialization of minimalism: the disciplined removal of ornament, figuration, and illusionistic depth, leaving only geometric primitives, industrial materials, and essential structural components so that what remains carries all the weight. It inherits minimalism's commitment to necessity-through-elimination and heightened emphasis on remaining elements, particularized to the visual-aesthetic case where the reduction operates on representational and decorative content and the encounter becomes phenomenological rather than illustrative.

Minimalism in art is a kind of minimalism that applies radical reduction of formal elements to visual and sculptural composition.


Minimax is the specific quantifier-alternation specialization of optimization — optimize over actions against a SUPREMUM over an adversary set (a sup-over-set rule), distinct from optimization in general. makes optimization/multiobjective_optimization the genus it is not identical to. Optimization supplies the genus: Finds best solution under constraints. Minimax Strategy preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Choose the action whose worst possible outcome is the best worst possible outcome — minimize the maximum loss an adversarial environment can inflict. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


Minimum_necessary_disclosure operates AFTER authorization — access_control gates who-may-read; this prime governs response-payload breadth under authorized access, projecting surplus at the source. It presupposes access_control (entry is already granted) and bounds what travels. Access Control supplies the prerequisite condition: Restrict system access. Minimum-Necessary Disclosure operates against that background: A producer delivers only the subset of its record a consumer's role requires, stripping the surplus at the source. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption.


MVP is 'Gall's Law operationalized for the venture substrate' — the prime is strictly more general (its viability predicate is 'works in its own environment', not 'customers pay'). galls_law is the parent; mvp keeps its satisficing/iteration parents. Gall's Law supplies the genus: A complex working system is reached only through a connected chain of simpler systems that each worked, never by from-scratch design of the whole. Minimum Viable Product (MVP) preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Minimum viable product. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


An MVP is the smallest version of a product that can be released to real users to gather feedback, and its defining commitment is that speed-to-feedback drives subsequent refinement. That stance collapses without Iteration as the surrounding structure: the MVP's output must become input to the next build, with state carried between rounds and progress measured across them. Stripped of the iterative loop it sits in, the MVP is just an underbuilt product rather than a learning instrument.

Minimum Viable Product presupposes Iteration: an MVP is meaningful only as the first round of a learn-and-refine cycle.


Minimum viable product is a specialization of satisficing. Specifically, it instantiates the aspiration-level-search-and-terminate pattern in the product development context: the aspiration is core-user-need-met, the search proceeds by progressively trimming features rather than expanding them, and the launch decision terminates search the moment the threshold is reached, accepting the design without proving no better one exists. Like other satisficing, it sacrifices optimality for speed; MVP is the subclass that explicitly trades pre-launch completeness for real-world feedback learning.

Minimum viable product is a specialization of satisficing that releases the simplest feature-set meeting core user needs to learn quickly.


This prime is 'a species of' optionality — the specific BACKWARD-looking form, preserving dominated residues already produced by a selection process, in addressable form, against a regime shift. is a specialization of optionality, specialized to retained out-voted signals. Optionality supplies the genus: The asymmetric value of having a choice—bounded downside, unbounded upside—without obligation to act. Minority Signal Preservation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A system deliberately retains dominated, out-voted signals in addressable form to preserve optionality against future regime shifts. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


Missing-data mechanisms (MCAR, MAR, MNAR) are the specific shape bias takes when observations are absent rather than mis-measured. Bias is a systematic, sign-bearing displacement of estimator outputs away from a true value that survives in the infinite-sample limit. Each missingness mechanism inscribes a particular bias signature: MCAR is unbiased complete-case but inefficient, MAR yields bias correctable by conditioning on observed variables, and MNAR produces bias that cannot be removed without modeling the missingness process itself. The taxonomy is precisely the structural anatomy of one bias source.

Missing-data mechanisms are the specific shape bias takes when systematic data absence skews inferences from observed values.