Simulated annealing presupposes the stochasticity-vs-determinism distinction because its central mechanism is the probabilistic acceptance of worsening moves with probability exp(-DeltaE/T), enabling escape from local optima that a purely deterministic descent could not exit. The algorithm trades on the structural option of intrinsic randomness rather than fully determined transitions. Without the prior availability of stochastic choice as a distinct dynamical regime, the cooling-schedule asymptotic-convergence story collapses, and the search reduces to deterministic local descent with no mechanism for crossing energy barriers.

Simulated annealing presupposes the stochasticity-vs-determinism distinction because its escape from local optima depends on probabilistically accepting worsening moves.


Single Point of Failure is the Center of Gravity 'seen from the defender's side', the same structural object without the optimizing attacker and migration. Center Of Gravity supplies the genus: In an adversarial system, the single cohesion-bearing node whose disruption disproportionately changes the whole contest — concentrating both defence and attack at that point. Single Point of Failure preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A component on the critical path of every essential function, with no parallel route, that caps the whole system's reliability at its own. 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.


An SPOF is a serial articulation node on the operational DEPENDENCY graph whose removal disconnects it; it presupposes a dependency topology and names the node every critical path runs through with no parallel route. (bottleneck is the nearest competing genus but governs throughput, not reliability — see rationale.)

An Single Point of Failure is a serial articulation node on the operational DEPENDENCY graph whose removal disconnects it; it presupposes a dependency topology and names the node every critical path runs through with no parallel route.


Vulnerability Hotspot supplies the genus: A place, population, or component where multiple independent sensitivities co-locate, so the joint probability of harm there is far larger than the product of marginal probabilities elsewhere and risk clusters rather than spreads evenly. Single Point of Failure preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A component on the critical path of every essential function, with no parallel route, that caps the whole system's reliability at its own. 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.

Single Point of Failure is a specialization of Vulnerability Hotspot, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Perception, comprehension, and projection must produce internal state-bearing products that guide delayed action; without those representations there is sensation or reaction but no three-level situation awareness.

Situation awareness contains linked representations of current elements, contextual meaning, and projected near-future state.


Social capital is the specific shape network takes when the entities are persons or groups and the connection pattern — the ties, their density, their bridging or bonding character — operates as a productive resource enabling actions infeasible for isolated actors. It is a structurally-particularized instance of the connection pattern carrying explanatory power independent of the entities, with the added commitment that the pattern's value is measured in what it enables: information flow, mutual support, credit without collateral, coordinated action. The resource inheres in ties, not in nodes, so an individual's access depends on position.

Social capital is the specific shape network takes when the connection pattern itself functions as a productive resource for the connected actors.


Social capital is the productive resource constituted by relationships, trust, shared norms, and network structure. Social norms are explicit internal constituents: distributed expectations of reciprocity, honesty, and contribution make behavior predictable and sustain cooperation without repeated case-by-case negotiation. Removing shared norms would leave connections and perhaps interpersonal trust, but would remove one of the named mechanisms through which the network coordinates collective action and reduces transaction costs.

Shared social norms are internal constituents of social capital, making reciprocity and cooperation predictable across a network.


Social capital treats relationships, trust, shared norms, and network position as productive resources that enable coordinated action unavailable to isolated actors. Trust is an explicit internal constituent of that resource bundle: confident reliance under vulnerability allows delegation, exchange, mutual support, and credit without exhaustive monitoring or collateral. Network ties without this trust component would not supply the reduced transaction costs and cooperative capacity that the live social-capital definition identifies.

Trust is an internal constituent of social capital, enabling vulnerable cooperation and exchange across network ties without complete monitoring.


Social choice is preference aggregation: a rule mapping a profile of individual orderings to one collective outcome. It presupposes aggregation as the collapsing operation, specialized to preference-bearing inputs + a property set the impossibility results constrain.


Social construction of reality runs externalization, objectivation, and internalization as the cycle by which human activity produces patterns that become treated as objective social facts. The closing move — agents taking norms, roles, and category structures inward so that what was once enforced externally is governed from within — is exactly Internalization. Without that inward crossing, the constructed patterns would remain mere external impositions; social construction presupposes internalization as the mechanism that makes the construction self-sustaining.

Social Construction of Reality presupposes Internalization: external patterns become objective reality only once agents take them inward as endogenous.


Social construction of reality presupposes performativity because the externalization-objectivation-internalization cycle works only insofar as constitutive acts bring social facts into being by being performed under shared felicity conditions. A marriage, a status, a category becomes treated as objective reality not because it describes an independent world but because authorized utterances and practices enact it. Without the constitutive-rather-than-descriptive move that performativity names, the joint human activity Berger and Luckmann describe cannot produce the apparently-thinglike institutions it generates.

Social construction of reality presupposes performativity because objectivation only sticks when constitutive acts repeatedly enact what they name.


Non-Zero-Sum Game supplies the genus: A strategic interaction whose joint payoff is not fixed: cooperative play can create value and destructive play can destroy it, so the size of the pie is endogenous to the strategy profile. Social Dilemma preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Individually rational defection yields a collectively worse outcome (canonical form: the Prisoner's Dilemma). 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.

Social Dilemma is a specialization of Non-Zero-Sum Game, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


A social dilemma is a specialization of trade-offs. The general pattern requires improving on one valued dimension to worsen another within a feasible set; a social dilemma instantiates this with the two dimensions being individual payoff and collective payoff, coupled such that the dominant individual strategy strictly degrades collective welfare. The Prisoner's Dilemma structure is the trade-off pattern with these particular axes operative and decision-makers who genuinely care about both, so the conflict between private rationality and group outcome is real rather than illusory.

A social dilemma is a specific kind of trade-off where individual-rational and collective-welfare dimensions are coupled in opposition.


Social identity theory begins with social categorization — the cognitive operation by which people parse the social world into discrete categories (nation, occupation, religion, team). Without that prior sorting work, there is no category for the self to identify with and no in-group/out-group structure for the rest of the theory to operate on. Classification supplies exactly this deliberate process of assigning entities to discrete categories according to defined criteria. Social identity theory presupposes that classificatory operation as the substrate on which identification, comparison, and intergroup behavior then build.

Social identity theory presupposes classification because deriving self-concept from group membership requires categories that sort people into kinds.


Social Identity Theory explains how individuals derive self-concept from social categories through categorization, identification, comparison, and distinctiveness-seeking. Each of these processes operates on a we-versus-they partition: categorization sorts people into in-group and out-group, identification binds self to the in-group, comparison favors the in-group over the out-group. The theory presupposes the we-they partition with its asymmetric treatment as the structural field on which it builds. Without an in-group/out-group division, there is nothing for social identification to attach to or for intergroup comparison to operate over.

Social Identity Theory presupposes in-group/out-group because its categorization-identification-comparison machinery operates on the we-they partition.


Social identity theory treats people as members of social categories from which they derive a portion of their self-concept. The whole construction requires set and membership as a prior structure: there must be a collection defined by some inclusion criterion, and an individual must stand in the membership relation to it. Set and membership supplies exactly this — the elemental treatment of a collection as a first-class object and the relation that says, for any candidate, whether it belongs. Without this primitive, there is no group for identity to attach to.

Social identity theory presupposes set and membership because identification with social categories requires the elemental notion of belonging to a collection.


Social loafing is the structurally-particularized form free riding takes in the team-effort case: when output pools individual contributions inseparably, the marginal benefit of one's own effort to personal evaluation and reward falls as group size rises, and rational self-interest reduces per-person contribution. It inherits free riding's structural commitment — benefit without proportionate contribution from a non-excludable joint product — particularized to the effort-allocation case where the joint product is task completion and non-excludability arises from non-attribution.

Social loafing is the specific shape free riding takes when individual contribution to a pooled output is not separately measurable.


Social norms establish shared expectations about how similarly situated group members ought to behave and make deviation criticizable and sanctionable. Removing the group, behavioral, distributed-knowledge, internalization, and informal-enforcement frame leaves normativity's portable structure: a standard partitions conduct into required, permissible, prohibited, correct, or deviant states and thereby enables evaluation and guidance. Social norms are that normative structure embodied in decentralized social practice.

Social norms are the social-group form normativity takes when behavioral standards are distributed through shared expectation, internalization, and informal sanction.


Sociotechnical systems analysis rests on the claim that outcomes arise from the interdependent interaction of social and technical components — change in one produces change in the other through specifiable mechanisms of mutual influence. Without coupling's machinery of dynamic linkage between subsystems with specifiable interaction strength, there would be no structural basis for treating social and technical components as a single integrated system rather than as separable layers. Coupling supplies the interaction-channel structure that makes sociotechnical analysis a non-decomposable enterprise.

Sociotechnical systems presupposes coupling because the framework's central claim is that social and technical subsystems are dynamically linked and inseparable.


Sociotechnical systems presupposes emergence because its defining claim — that outcomes arise from interdependent social and technical interaction, not from either component in isolation — is precisely an emergence claim at the higher level of organization. It inherits emergence's structural commitment: the higher-level phenomenon (organizational behavior, work outcomes) has properties not predictable from the lower-level constituents (technology alone or humans alone) and not reducible to their separate descriptions. Same-technology-different-outcomes is the emergence signature.

Sociotechnical systems presupposes emergence because joint outcomes arise from social–technical interaction in ways not reducible to either domain alone.


Sociotechnical systems is the structurally-particularized instance of systems thinking in which the unit of analysis is the interlock between social components (people, culture, organization) and technical components (tools, processes, infrastructure). It carries forward the general systems-thinking commitment that outcomes are governed by relationships and feedback among parts rather than by parts in isolation, and gives it specific shape: the same technology produces different results under different work organizations because outcomes depend on the joint design of social and technical subsystems.

Sociotechnical systems is the specific shape systems thinking takes when the parts in interdependent relation are human-organizational and technical components.


Solidarity names a felt mutual obligation that disposes members to bear individual cost on behalf of the collective, sustaining contribution without case-by-case exchange. Its work is visible precisely in the gap between privately optimal and collectively optimal action — the gap that defines cooperation. Where contribution and self-interest already coincide, no solidarity is needed to produce joint benefit. Solidarity functions as one of the durable mechanisms that close cooperation's defection gap, so its purpose presupposes the cooperation problem it answers.

Solidarity presupposes cooperation because internalized fate-sharing only matters where individual incentive pulls against collective contribution.


Solidarity is the disposition of members to bear individual cost for fellow members, sustained by internalized fate-sharing and generalized obligation. Those dispositions presuppose that the collective already holds together as a unit rather than dissolving into separate individuals — exactly the resistance-to-fragmentation that group cohesion names. Without the underlying binding force that keeps the group from breaking apart, there is no membership for solidarity's obligations to attach to. Solidarity is one of several superposable sources that supply cohesion, and operates only where cohesion is already a meaningful structural property.

Solidarity presupposes group cohesion because fate-sharing and felt mutual obligation only exist within a collective that is bound together as a unit.


Solidarity is the specific shape internalization takes when what crosses the boundary from outside to inside is the group's fate and obligation structure. The boundary-relocation internalization names appears here as members taking the group's interest as partly their own: generalized mutual obligation and fate-sharing operate from within rather than via external sanction or case-by-case exchange. What was an external bond -- enforced by community pressure or transactional exchange -- becomes an internal disposition to bear cost on behalf of fellow members, exactly the externally-mediated-to-endogenously-governed pattern internalization describes.

Solidarity is the specific shape internalization takes when group fate is taken inward as a personal stake binding individual to collective action.


Source-sink dynamics is constituted by a DIRECTED FLOW between sites on which the sink depends ('the direction of the flow is load-bearing'); it presupposes flow. Flow supplies the prerequisite condition: Structured movement of energy, matter, or information. Source-Sink Dynamics operates against that background: A system persists across coupled sites with asymmetric net balance: net-producing sources export a surplus that sustains net-consuming sinks which would decline in isolation. 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.


It sorts bounded components into discrete source, sink, or balanced roles by applying one reusable decision rule: compute net transfer relative to a reference pool over a stated window and read its sign. It adds the boundary, window, tracked-quantity, and sign-flip commitments to the general classification operation.

A source-sink role is a classification specialized by an explicit signed-net-flux rule.


Without named components, a reference pool, and directed inflows and outflows of a tracked quantity, no net flux can be computed and the sign has no referent. The reservoir-flux network supplies that accounting substrate; the source-sink role adds a conditional sign classification.

Assigning a source or sink role requires a bounded stock-flow account linking the component to a reference reservoir.


Sovereignty is the authority principle that one entity holds final, non-overridable decision-making power within a defined domain, with internal and external components. The construct is meaningful only as a specific structural form of authority — the legitimate capacity to make binding decisions and create persisting obligations. Authority supplies the underlying recognized-power-to-decide; sovereignty specializes it by adding finality (no external override), domain-boundedness (the zone of autonomous action), and recognition by other sovereigns. Without authority as the structural ground, sovereignty's finality has no decision-power to be final over.

Sovereignty presupposes authority because final decision-making within a domain is a particular form of legitimate binding power.


Sovereignty presupposes boundary because the doctrine operationally requires a demarcated domain that distinguishes inside (where the sovereign decides) from outside (where it cannot). It inherits boundary's four-part structure: the bounded entity (the sovereign's territory or jurisdiction), the demarcation criterion (recognized scope), the permeability (treaties, extradition, intervention), and the operative force (final authority within). Internal and external sovereignty are precisely the inside-authority and outside-recognition faces of a boundary applied to political decision rights.

Sovereignty presupposes boundary because it defines a demarcated domain within which final decision authority holds and beyond which it does not.


Spaced repetition presupposes learning because it operates as a memory-strengthening procedure on items that have already been encoded as candidate learning, and it targets the durability dimension of the learner's internal update. Without learning's underlying experience-driven self-update, there is no encoded representation for the expanding-interval review schedule to act upon. Spaced repetition supplies the strength-modulated rescheduling that converts fragile acquisitions into stable ones, but the acquisition machinery itself is supplied by learning.

Spaced repetition presupposes learning because it is a procedure for strengthening durable memory updates against forgetting over time.


Spaced repetition is an interval-scheduling pedagogical technique; typical because it is often self-directed rather than other-directed. Pedagogy supplies the genus: Deliberate other-directed structuring of a learner's encounter with content to cause durable change in their capability. Spaced Repetition preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Reinforce over intervals. 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.


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. Span adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: The complete set reachable by combining primitives under admissible operations. 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.

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


Span is the reachable CLOSURE of a primitive set under an admissible-operations grammar — a closure (operations stay within a set) enriched with generators + a grammar + a gap-to-target fork. closure is the structural genus.

Span is the reachable CLOSURE of a primitive set under an admissible-operations grammar — a closure (operations stay within a set) enriched with generators and a grammar and a gap-to-target fork.


Sparse coding is a representational-architecture pattern — a specific way of representing content (few-of-many active over a large pool). is a specialization of specialized representation scheme. Representation supplies the genus: Model complex ideas. Sparse Coding preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A system represents each input by activating a small content-specific subset of a much larger pool of units, gaining combinatorial capacity from the choice of which few are active. 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 specific organization that makes POSITION/REGION queries output-sensitive (via metric embedding) — a specialization of the general search_and_retrieval problem. Search and Retrieval supplies the genus: Locate and extract information. Spatial Indexing preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Organizing items by position in a space so retrieval, neighborhood, and range queries become geometric and output-sensitive. 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 speculative bubble is the positive-feedback particularization of feedback applied to asset valuation: rising prices feed expectations of further rises, which drive more buying, which drives prices higher still, until the loop exhausts its inflow and reverses sharply. Where feedback names the closure of a loop between system output and subsequent input generally, the bubble fixes the variable (price), the sign (reinforcing), the medium (collective expectation), and the characteristic boom-then-bust signature of an overshoot-and-collapse trajectory.

A speculative bubble is the specific shape feedback takes when valuation and expectation of future rises form a self-reinforcing loop that overshoots and collapses.


Speculative bubbles are a kind of increasing returns specialized to asset valuation under reflexive expectations: rising prices increase each marginal buyer's willingness to enter because rising prices are themselves the expected payoff. It inherits the general pattern that the marginal benefit of additional commitment rises with the cumulative state variable, producing self-reinforcing dynamics, and supplies the specific case where the accumulating variable is valuation and the loop is expectational — until the inflow exhausts and the increasing-returns regime reverses sharply into a crash.

Speculative bubbles are a specialization of increasing returns in which rising valuations attract more buyers, driving valuations higher still.


Speculative bubbles presuppose reflexivity because the boom-then-bust signature is generated by traders' beliefs about future prices becoming inputs that drive current prices, which feed back into beliefs. Reflexivity supplies the general structural pattern in which a system's models of itself become inputs that shape its behavior — the self-referential coupling between observation and observed. Bubbles supply the specific market case where the reflexive coupling between expectations and valuations overshoots fundamentals and then collapses; without the reflexive loop, the detachment from fundamentals would not be self-reinforcing.

Speculative bubbles presuppose reflexivity because the self-reinforcing boom-bust loop is driven by beliefs about prices becoming inputs that shape prices.


Speech act theory is the structurally-particularized form performativity takes in the linguistic-utterance case: the locutionary act delivers form, the illocutionary act carries conventional force that brings the named state into being under felicity conditions, and the perlocutionary act tracks downstream effects. It inherits performativity's commitment that the act and the fact are co-created in one move, particularized to the three-layer analysis of how speech does things rather than describes them.

Speech act theory is the specific shape performativity takes when an utterance's illocutionary force constitutes the social fact it names.


Spinodal decomposition is the barrier-less instability case: a homogeneous state with negative local-stability curvature amplifies ambient fluctuations rather than damping them — a specialization of instability (perturbations grow). Instability supplies the genus: Amplifies perturbations. Spinodal Decomposition preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A uniform state spontaneously separates into distinct phases because it is itself unstable, so ambient fluctuations are amplified rather than damped, producing a characteristic-wavelength pattern without any barrier or nucleus. 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 uniform (symmetric) state spontaneously separates into distinct phases at a characteristic wavelength — barrier-less symmetry breaking. Symmetry Breaking supplies the genus: Loss of symmetry creates structure. Spinodal Decomposition preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A uniform state spontaneously separates into distinct phases because it is itself unstable, so ambient fluctuations are amplified rather than damped, producing a characteristic-wavelength pattern without any barrier or nucleus. 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.


Each round of silence makes one side look less prevalent, which raises the perceived cost of expressing that side and produces more silence. Without this recursive return from public expression to later expression choices, isolated preference falsification would not become a population-level spiral.

Spiral of Silence presupposes the positive feedback loop through which visible suppression changes perceived opinion climate and induces further suppression.


Preference Falsification is the individual expressive act under asymmetric cost; Spiral of Silence is the population-level feedback dynamic that aggregates those acts, feeds the distorted visible distribution back into perceived climate, and amplifies further suppression. The acts are internal constituents of the loop, not a genus of the whole dynamic.

Spiral of Silence contains preference-falsifying suppression choices as the individual acts aggregated and amplified by its climate-perception feedback loop.


Every spiral sustains a gap between privately held and publicly expressed opinion, then adds the specific mechanism that the visible gap changes perceived climate and raises the cost of later dissent. Private-Public Preference Divergence can exist as a snapshot or through other mechanisms, so Spiral of Silence is its strict feedback-driven species.

Spiral of Silence is the temporal-feedback species of Private-Public Preference Divergence in which suppression recursively steepens the apparent majority.


The dynamic requires a boundary at which perceived minority status changes expression behavior. Remove that gating point and the loop loses the suppression trigger that produces its slow build and possible cascade reversal. Threshold is therefore a constituent of the social-opinion whole, while generic thresholds do not contain or depend on Spiral of Silence.

Spiral of Silence contains a perceived-minority Threshold below which the expected cost of expression triggers suppression.


Authority supplies the prerequisite condition: The recognized, legitimate right to issue binding decisions within a defined scope, distinct from raw coercive force or mere persuasive influence. Sponsor Vacuum operates against that background: A designated decision-resolving role is occupied but disengaged, and its nominal occupancy suppresses the formation of substitute decision channels, so the system loses both the function and its replacement. 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.

Sponsor Vacuum presupposes Authority, whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


A positive-feedback loop running through agents/components inside a system (low volatility -> relaxed vigilance -> raised exposure -> more fragility). Presupposes feedback. (feedback canonical.). Feedback supplies the prerequisite condition: Outputs influence inputs. Stability-Induced Fragility operates against that background: Prolonged calm endogenously erodes the response capacity that stressors keep exercised. 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.


Stack is a specialized ordering discipline in which entries form a strict nesting relation and the most recently opened item must be the next one closed; removing that differentia leaves the more general ordering relation.

Stack is the LIFO species of order, adding strict nesting and last-opened-first-closed precedence.


Stage-gate is a sequence of precedence-ordered, evidence-conditional stages with escalating commitment — a specialization of sequencing (deliberate ordering of steps under precedence). The gate-decision chain is the load-bearing structure; sequencing is the genus.


Stakeholder analysis enumerates parties with legitimate interest, exposure, or claim, which structurally requires drawing a boundary between those inside the system of consequence and those outside it. Without the boundary prime's machinery — demarcation between an entity and its outside, with attendant flows and accountability — there would be no principled basis for the inclusion-exclusion decision that determines who counts as a stakeholder. The boundary structure is what makes stakeholder identification a determinate analytic operation rather than an open-ended listing.

Stakeholder analysis presupposes boundary because identifying who has a legitimate interest requires deciding who is inside the system of consequence and who is outside.


Classification is the deliberate process of assigning entities to discrete categories according to explicit rules. Stakeholder analysis is the particular shape this operation takes when the entities are parties with a stake in a decision and the categories sort them by interest, power, legitimacy, urgency, or relationship to the outcome. It is a structurally-particularized instance of classification whose specific machinery is enumeration of parties, criteria for sorting them into bins (high-power high-interest, low-power high-interest, etc.), and a management plan keyed to the resulting category structure.

Stakeholder analysis is the specific shape classification takes when applied to parties with a legitimate interest in a decision or project.


Starvation is 'a particular liveness outcome that contention can produce' — a failure mode of contention under a locally-rational priority rule. It presupposes contention; contention is the general condition, starvation the specific liveness violation. Interference and Contention supplies the prerequisite condition: Competing demands for shared bottleneck degrade throughput. Starvation operates against that background: A participant who is eligible and in the queue is perpetually denied service, not by exclusion but because a locally rational priority rule always picks someone else. 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.


Stasis shares framing's meta-level character but ADDS what framing lacks — a specific small ORDERED typology of question-kinds (conjecture, definition, quality, jurisdiction) with a logical priority. It decomposes 'partly into framing'; framing is the broad genus, stasis the typed-disagreement species. NOTE this is the rhetoric prime (locate the KIND of question in a dispute), not stillness/equilibrium. Framing supplies the genus: Presentation shapes perception. Stasis preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Locate the kind of question at issue in a dispute—did it happen, what is it, was it justified, whose call is it—before contesting the substance, since disputants who seem to disagree about the answer are often disagreeing about the question. 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.


Remove the set of admissible system states and the transition relation loses its domain and codomain: there is no defined condition from which the system can move or to which it can arrive. Phase Space is the whole possibility set contained in the larger state-plus-transition model.

A state-and-transition model contains a phase or state space specifying the possible states over which its transition relation operates.


Wording, response options, ordering, incentives, and interviewer or prompt context can shape the recorded report even when the latent valuation is unchanged. This contribution is typical rather than strict because a carefully controlled channel can approximate a transparent readout and channel sensitivity is not part of every formal definition of stated preference.

A stated-preference estimate usually contains a systematic contribution from the question, prompt, scale, or protocol through which the report was elicited.


A stated-preference instrument asks an agent to report which outcomes, actions, or bundles it favors. Without Preference as the latent evaluative ordering, there is nothing for the answer to represent or for the analyst to infer. Stated Preference adds an access method and its distortions; it is not the underlying valuation.

Stated Preference presupposes an underlying preference because the solicited report is evidence about an ordering, not the ordering itself.


Two outputs become a gap only after they are placed in a shared frame and their ordering, magnitude, or action implications are compared. Without that alignment the records can differ in content without supporting a meaningful stated-versus-revealed discrepancy.

The gap contains a comparison that aligns the stated and revealed estimates over the same focal alternatives and reads off their systematic divergence.


The second side must be an ordering inferred from observed choice under a documented menu and cost structure. Remove Revealed Preference and only a report remains, so the defining two-channel divergence disappears.

The gap contains the choice-based estimate inferred from what the agent does when alternatives and consequences are present.


One side of the identity must be an ordering inferred from what the agent says when asked. Remove Stated Preference and only behavior remains, so there is no report-versus-choice mismatch to measure.

The gap contains the report-based estimate whose output is compared with behavior under a real choice opportunity.


Stationarity is a specialization of invariance. Specifically, it names the case in which the family of transformations is time-translation (or spatial shifts) and the preserved feature is the statistical structure of the stochastic process -- mean, variance, autocorrelation, higher moments. Like every invariance claim, it commits jointly to what is preserved and under which operations; stationarity is the subclass where individual realizations fluctuate but the generating distribution remains shift-invariant within the asserted window.

Stationarity is a specialization of invariance whose preserved feature is a process's statistical distribution under time (or spatial) translation.


Stationarity presupposes probability because the invariance being asserted concerns the joint distribution of the stochastic process — mean, variance, autocorrelation, higher moments — and these are objects within Kolmogorov's measure-theoretic framework. Without probability's coherence apparatus quantifying uncertainty over sample spaces, there would be no distribution whose invariance under time-shift could be claimed. Strict, wide-sense, and cyclostationary variants are all probabilistic-invariance specifications.

Stationarity presupposes probability because the invariance claim is about the joint distribution of the process under temporal translation.


Stationarity presupposes time because its content is a time-translation invariance claim: the statistical generating rules of the process are the same at t as at t+τ. Without time's structural commitment — an ordered dimension along which events succeed, with measurable duration — there would be no axis along which to assert translation invariance. The notion that distributions "do not drift" is precisely a statement about constancy under shifts in the temporal coordinate.

Stationarity presupposes time because its claim is precisely that statistical characteristics remain invariant across translations along the temporal dimension.


Probability supplies the prerequisite condition: Quantifies uncertainty and likelihoods. Statistical Independence operates against that background: Learning one variable gives no information about another; the joint distribution factors. 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.

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


Statistical inference is a specialization of inductive reasoning. Specifically, it instantiates the from-specific-observations-to-broader-generalizations pattern with explicit probability modeling: a sample is treated as one draw from a distribution and the inference moves from observed cases to claims about parameters, mechanisms, or future outcomes. Like every inductive inference, the conclusion exceeds the premises and retains characteristic uncertainty; statistical inference is the subclass where that uncertainty is calibrated through frequentist or Bayesian probability machinery rather than left as informal support strength.

Statistical inference is a specialization of inductive reasoning that draws population-level claims from sample evidence with quantified uncertainty.


Statistical inference treats observed data as one realization from a probability distribution over possible samples and uses that distribution to draw conclusions about underlying parameters, mechanisms, or future outcomes. Without Probability — calibrated numerical measures obeying additivity, normalization, and conditioning — there is no sampling distribution to reason from and no coherent way to combine evidence. Inference presupposes probability as the formal substrate on which sampling variability and likelihood calculations are defined.

Statistical Inference presupposes Probability: drawing conclusions from samples requires modeling sample variability as a probability distribution.


Statistical inference is the reasoning by which finite-sample observations support claims about populations or mechanisms, with explicit accounting for sampling variability and model assumptions. The apparatus is meaningful only because the conclusions are not deterministic: aleatoric noise, epistemic ignorance, and finite data leave irreducible gaps. Inference presupposes Uncertainty as its operating condition — its central tools, from confidence intervals to posterior distributions, are explicit characterizations of what remains unknown after the data are in.

Statistical Inference presupposes Uncertainty: the whole apparatus exists to draw conclusions despite incomplete and sample-limited knowledge.


Statistical power presupposes experimental design because the quantities binding power — effect size, sample size, significance level, variability — are all set by the design choices that allocate units to treatments, specify outcome measurement, and control noise. It inherits experimental design's commitment to principled architecture for causal inference under constraints, and operates as the diagnostic that asks whether the design is adequately sized to detect a true effect. Power analysis is design's planning tool.

Statistical power presupposes experimental design because its computation requires the pre-specified architecture of treatment assignment, sample size, and outcome measurement.


Statistical power presupposes probability because power = P(reject H0 | H1 true) is itself a probability assignment over decision outcomes governed by Kolmogorov's coherence rules. The four quantities binding power -- effect size, sample size, significance level, variability -- enter through the sampling distribution of the test statistic, which is a probability object. Without probability's apparatus for combining, conditioning, and normalizing degrees of belief or frequency, the Type I and Type II error rates and their trade-off have no formal home; power is conditional probability deployed in a decision frame. Probability supplies the prerequisite condition: Quantifies uncertainty and likelihoods. Statistical Power operates against that background: Probability of detecting effect. 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.

Statistical power presupposes probability because it is a calibrated probability quantifying correct rejection of a false null.


Statistical significance presupposes hypothesis testing because the p-value's interpretation as evidence against a null requires the structured testing apparatus: a stated null, a chosen test statistic with known null distribution, and a pre-specified threshold that turns the continuous tail probability into a reject/retain verdict. Without the prior framing of inference as a contest between null and alternative under controlled error rates, the tail probability is a number with no decision-theoretic anchor. Hypothesis testing supplies the frame that makes significance actionable.

Statistical significance presupposes hypothesis testing because the p-value is read as evidence-against only within a pre-specified null/alternative testing frame.


Statistical significance summarizes evidence against a null hypothesis as a p-value: the probability, computed under the assumed null model, of a test statistic at least as extreme as the one observed. That number has no meaning without Probability as the calibrated apparatus that assigns measures to events under a stipulated distribution and obeys Kolmogorov's coherence rules. Significance testing presupposes probability as the substrate on which the tail-probability calculation and its interpretation rest.

Statistical Significance presupposes Probability: a p-value is the tail probability of a test statistic under an assumed null model.


Statistical significance is a specialization of statistical inference focused on one specific reasoning move: quantifying how incompatible observed data are with a stated null hypothesis by computing the tail probability of a test statistic under that null. It inherits the general inferential commitment of reasoning from sample to population while explicitly accounting for sampling variability, and specializes by fixing the reference distribution to the null and reading the result as evidence-against. The p-value is one concrete output of the inferential apparatus, not a separate kind of reasoning.

Statistical significance is a specialization of statistical inference that summarizes sample-data incompatibility with a null via a tail probability.


STEEP/PESTLE Analysis is a kind of environmental scanning specialized by a particular category schema: it organizes the external-factor space into Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, and Legal (sometimes Ethical) dimensions to ensure scanning coverage across each. It inherits environmental scanning's commitment to deliberate, continuing, structured monitoring of external factors for strategic relevance, and supplies the specific schema that counters organizational tendencies to systematically underweight some factor categories — typically environmental, ethical, or social — relative to economic and technological.

STEEP/PESTLE Analysis is a specialization of environmental scanning that organizes external-factor monitoring into a fixed category schema.


Stereotyping is the cognitive process of applying generalized category beliefs to individual members of a category, projecting an associated prototype without detailed assessment. That projection presupposes the prior classificatory work that produces the categories themselves: the agent must already sort the social world into race, gender, age, occupation bins before any stereotype can be activated. Classification supplies the deliberate category-assignment apparatus on which stereotyping then operates by attaching content-rich expectations to category membership and projecting them onto individuals.

Stereotyping presupposes classification because applying generalized category beliefs requires that categories already sort people into kinds.


Stereotyping is a kind of heuristic specialized to social perception: the agent observes a category cue, activates an associated prototype, and projects that expectation onto an individual without individualized assessment. It inherits heuristic's commitment to a simplified rule trading accuracy for speed with utility measured by ecological fit, and supplies the specific case where the inference task is social judgment, the surrogate rule is category-to-prototype activation, and the characteristic error is the systematic suppression of individual variation in favor of categorical archetypes.

Stereotyping is a specialization of heuristic in which a category cue triggers a prototype expectation projected onto an individual without detailed assessment.


Regime Change supplies the genus: A discontinuous flip of a system from one stable operating regime to a qualitatively different one, where the same inputs produce fundamentally different responses on either side of a feedback-driven threshold. Stock Disabled Control preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A flow lever stops working when a shock pushes the system's stock variable outside the range where flow-margin nudges propagate; pulling harder fails until the stock is repaired. 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.

Stock Disabled Control is a specialization of Regime Change, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


A Stovepipe System cannot exist until a larger capability has been divided into separately owned or implemented vertical stacks. It adds a particular defective decomposition: cross-cutting concerns are reimplemented inside each vertical, interfaces and horizontal services are absent, and system-level recomposition pays a super-linear integration tax. Modularity is not the genus because its live identity requires defined shared interfaces that the stovepipe constitutively lacks.

Every Stovepipe System presupposes Decomposition into parallel verticals; the pathology is that shared concerns are duplicated and no horizontal recomposition layer exists.


Game-Theoretic Strategy supplies the prerequisite condition: Strategic interaction analysis. Strategic Complementarity operates against that background: One actor's action raises the marginal benefit of others taking the same action. 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.

Strategic Complementarity typically presupposes Game-Theoretic Strategy, whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


A submodular-payoff / downward-sloping-best-response property of an interdependent-payoff game; presupposes the strategic-interaction apparatus. Sign-flipped twin of strategic_complementarity, graded as a matched pair. Game-Theoretic Strategy supplies the prerequisite condition: Strategic interaction analysis. Strategic Substitute operates against that background: One actor's action lowers the marginal benefit of others taking the same action. 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.


Stratification is a specialization of layering in which the layers are physical strata produced by sequential deposition, accumulation, or differentiation of materials — sedimentary beds, atmospheric layers, social strata, organizational tiers ordered by some ranking variable. It inherits layering's general structure of horizontal levels each providing a defined scope while resting on the levels below, and specializes by fixing the formation mechanism to layered deposition or ranked ordering along a vertical axis. The resulting structure supports analysis by stratum: each layer has internal coherence and bounded interfaces with the layers above and below.

Stratification is a specialization of layering in which the layers are formed by geological or material deposition processes producing horizontal strata.


It retains a repeatable directional distortion in a process and fixes the process to search or inquiry: accessibility lowers the cost of inspecting one region, causing effort to concentrate there even when the answer is likelier elsewhere.

The Streetlight Effect is Bias specialized to search allocation systematically displaced toward observable regions rather than relevance-weighted ones.


Without a sought object, a search space, and some traversal or evidence acquisition process, there is no allocation that observability can bias. Search and Retrieval supplies that process; the child adds a systematic cost-driven mismatch between the region searched and the region relevant.

The Streetlight Effect presupposes Search and Retrieval because the distortion is defined over where a query, investigation, or diagnostic search allocates effort.


The control action becomes a new signal, audience response republishes both signal and target, and the growing visibility recruits still more response; without that return path there is only a failed removal attempt.

The Streisand effect contains a reinforcing loop in which visible suppression generates attention that further increases the suppressed information's reach.


Stress and rupture describes accumulated strain in an apparently stable system that releases suddenly when latent load exceeds a rupture threshold, reorganizing into a new equilibrium. This presupposes criticality: the state poised at a phase boundary where qualitatively distinct regimes meet and response becomes unbounded. The rupture moment is the system crossing the critical point at which the prior regime's stability evaporates and a phase-transition-style reorganization occurs. Without criticality's framework of regime boundaries and divergent susceptibility, the long-invisible-then-sudden signature of rupture has no structural basis.

Stress and rupture presupposes criticality because the sudden catastrophic release after invisible accumulation is the system crossing a critical threshold.


Stress and rupture is a specialization of state-and-state-transition: the system occupies an apparently stable state while a hidden variable (accumulated stress) drifts toward a threshold, at which point a triggered transition jumps it discontinuously to a new equilibrium. It inherits the state-transition framework's apparatus — state space, transition relation, triggers, outputs — and particularizes it to the threshold-crossing case where the transition is concentrated in time despite long latent accumulation.

Stress and rupture is a kind of state transition in which accumulated internal strain triggers a sudden jump from one equilibrium regime to another.


Stressor-induced adaptation is a specialization of adaptation. The general adaptation pattern is structural modification in response to sustained environmental change, preserving or improving fit. The stressor-induced variant specifies that the modifying input is bounded strain — desirable difficulties in learning, hormesis in toxicology, progressive overload in exercise — and that the characteristic signature is inverted short-run versus long-run outcomes. The same internal-modification logic of adaptation applies, with controlled stress as the specific trigger and durable strength as the specific gain.

Stressor-induced adaptation is a specialization of adaptation in which controlled difficulty degrades short-run performance while building long-run capacity.


Stressor-induced adaptation describes the inverted relationship in which controlled bouts of difficulty degrade immediate performance while building durable structural strength that becomes available against future demands. That is the construction of latent reserve — slack, flexibility, learned response — that defines Adaptive Capacity. Stressor-induced adaptation specializes adaptive capacity by naming the mechanism: applied strain triggers compensatory build-up, growing the reorganization reserve available for disturbances beyond current scope.

Stressor-Induced Adaptation is a kind of adaptive capacity: controlled strain now builds the latent reserve that supports robust function later.


Remove the interval after the stress dose during which load is reduced and compensatory capacity is built. The dose is then paid without durable adaptive gain, so the stressor-to-stronger-state trajectory loses an identity-constitutive stage.

Stressor-Induced Adaptation contains a Capacity-Recovery Interval because the post-stress low-load period is where the compensatory response consolidates into durable capacity.


Stressor-induced adaptation requires the system to detect strain, route that signal back into its own reconfiguration, and grow capacity in proportion to repeated load. Without that loop the strain merely degrades function rather than building lasting strength. Feedback — output routed back to influence subsequent input — supplies the structural arrangement that converts current stress into future capacity. Stressor-induced adaptation presupposes feedback as the mechanism by which strain becomes a build signal rather than damage.

Stressor-Induced Adaptation presupposes Feedback: applied strain must be sensed and routed back into the system to drive compensatory build-up.


Structural Filtering inherits Selection's input stream, passage conditions, differential survival, and compositionally changed output. It adds several parallel institutional filters whose intersection predicts the surviving content even when individual producers are sincere and interchangeable. That makes it a sibling of Gatekeeping under Selection: Gatekeeping requires a focal discretionary arbiter at a choke point, while Structural Filtering explains selection precisely where no such arbiter is load-bearing.

Structural filtering is selection specialized to several parallel institutional pressures whose intersection shapes surviving output without requiring a focal discretionary gatekeeper.


Structural violence is a specialization of asymmetry: the relation between populations and the institutional arrangements that condition their life chances fails the swap-test — exchanging populations changes who suffers premature mortality, restricted potential, and unmet need. It inherits asymmetry's structural commitment to directed imbalance in which one side is privileged or more endowed than another, particularized to the institutional-harm case where the asymmetry is structural rather than acute and the gap is between potential and actual.

Structural violence is a kind of asymmetry in which social arrangements systematically privilege some populations over others in harm distribution.


Structural violence diagnoses systematic harm produced by social arrangements — legal, economic, spatial — that restrict certain populations' ability to meet basic needs even when material capacity exists. The harm is constituted by the gap between potential and actual, and that gap is generated by binding restrictions on admissible configurations of life-course, access, and resource flow. Constraint supplies the structural object: a condition that prunes the feasible set independent of merit. Structural violence is constraint with a specific source (social arrangement) and a specific consequence (avoidable population-level harm).

Structural violence presupposes constraint because the harm it names is produced by social arrangements that systematically restrict admissible life-courses.


The sublime presupposes scale because its defining trigger is an encounter with magnitudes, immense scale, overwhelming power, or unbounded complexity, that exceed ordinary perceptual and cognitive limits. Scale supplies the general apparatus by which size, resolution, and level of aggregation become first-class objects of reasoning, including the recognition that the system at one scale may be qualitatively different from the system at another. The sublime is the aesthetic response that registers when the encountered magnitude crosses into a regime where ordinary scaling intuitions fail.

The sublime presupposes scale because its aesthetic response is triggered by an encounter with magnitudes that transgress ordinary perceptual limits.


Substitutability is the consequence/dividend the ADT apparatus produces and disciplines ('Substitutability names the dividend; the ADT names the whole machine that pays it'). After the systems_cybernetics frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Abstract Data Type: Specify a component by its externally observable behaviour while suppressing its implementation, so any conforming implementation is interchangeable behind the contract. Substitutability adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: One component replaces another without functional degradation. 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.


Substitutability is a specialization of compatibility in which the relational property is read in its replacement direction: not just that two entities can coexist or interoperate, but that one can take the other's place in a system without functional degradation. It inherits the general compatibility commitment that two entities can interact without breakage when their signatures align, and specializes by tightening the alignment to behavioral subtyping: every property required of the original must remain true of the replacement, so the system's critical functions are invariant under substitution.

Substitutability is a specialization of compatibility focused on the symmetric case where one entity can replace another while preserving system function.


'Substitutability is one consequence of containerization (any handler takes any conforming unit), not the pattern. After the systems_cybernetics frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Containerization: Wrap a unit with its dependencies behind a standardized exterior so substrate-blind handlers can move it intact. Substitutability adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: One component replaces another without functional degradation. 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.


Substitutability presupposes the stable, well-defined module interfaces modularity provides — swap one component for another behind the interface. Modularity supplies the prerequisite condition: Breaks systems into smaller units. Substitutability operates against that background: One component replaces another without functional degradation. 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.


Recruitment is built directly on affordances — 'the affordance is the pre-existing perception-to-action link the prime's third role names; recruitment is what a designer does with it.' Affordance is the descriptive capacity; recruitment deliberately engages it to elicit a chosen behavior. Presupposes affordance (the engaged link). Affordance supplies the prerequisite condition: An action possibility offered by the fit between an agent and its environment. Substrate-Cued Behavior Recruitment operates against that background: Modifying a substrate so that perceiving it elicits a target behavior without explicit instruction. 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 pattern cannot be identified from adoption of a shared substrate alone. It requires a prior demarcation maintained by carrier differences and a demonstrable weakening of that demarcation once the differences cease to bind.

The boundary whose operational support disappears is an internal constituent of substrate-induced boundary dissolution.


The process maps a system organized around separate carriers into one where the same functions can be represented or executed on a common substrate. Functions may persist while the taxonomy and dependencies around their old carriers change, making this a strict carrier-partition transformation.

Substrate-induced boundary dissolution is a transformation whose invariant is the carried function or content and whose alteration is the partition among carrier-defined kinds.


The summary surface is the observable, cheaply consumed stand-in from which most readers infer the evidence-bearing substance. The two-author, two-audience incentive split supplies this species' strict differentia: it persistently lowers proxy-target fidelity by letting the surfaces optimize independently. Proxy–Target Fidelity also covers faithful proxies and many failure mechanisms with no bifurcated artifact, so the relation is strict subsumption rather than identity or a generic Representation shortcut.

Summary Substance Divergence is the low-fidelity Proxy–Target Fidelity species in which a high-attention summary stands in for a costly substance surface and independent authorship incentives let the proxy drift.


Summative assessment is a specialization of pedagogy whose distinctive move is closing the instructional cycle with an evaluation of learning at a defined endpoint — unit, course, program — for purposes of certification, grading, accountability, or selection. It inherits pedagogy's commitment to deliberately structuring the learner's encounter with content for durable capability change, and adds the specific function of producing an external-audience verdict on what was achieved, making the assessment a terminal snapshot rather than a mid-course correction within the instructional process.

Summative assessment is a specific pedagogical practice that evaluates learning at the conclusion of an instructional period to certify achievement.


Sunk cost and irreversible commitment names the tension between the rational irrelevance of past expenditure and its observed behavioral weight, which presupposes the underlying distinction between actions that can be unwound and actions that cannot. Without the reversibility dimension, there would be no irreversibility to make sunk costs structurally binding and no contrast between the rational forward-looking criterion and the psychological pull of past commitment. The parent prime supplies the substrate on which sunk-cost dynamics operate.

Sunk cost and irreversible commitment presupposes reversibility and irreversibility because the structural difficulty of reversal is what gives sunk costs their behavioral grip.


A particular pathological region of the dose-response space — the case where the response curve has NO saturation over the engineered range and the referent is artificially generated beyond anything natural. A specialization of dose_response_relationship. Dose-Response Relationship supplies the genus: Input-output mapping. Supernormal Stimulus preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A response circuit calibrated only over a natural cue range, with no built-in ceiling, is hijacked by an engineered referent that exceeds that range and triggers disproportionate response. 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.


Every Superposition admitted by this entry holds alternatives in one weighted combined representation. Scaling each basis state by its amplitude or weight and adding the results is exactly Linear Combination. Superposition adds coexistence, interference, basis dependence, normalization, and a collapse or commitment boundary; generic linear combinations such as portfolios and indices need none of those additions.

Superposition presupposes Linear Combination because its coexisting state is represented as a weighted sum of basis states before resolution.


Supersaturation is the loading face of metastability: an intensive variable held past its equilibrium-permitted level by kinetic isolation, storing release potential. is a specialization of metastable configuration with an above-equilibrium gap. Metastability supplies the genus: A system persists in a locally stable configuration that is not the global optimum, held there by a barrier that routine disturbances cannot clear. Supersaturation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: An intensive variable is driven past its equilibrium-permitted level and held there by kinetic isolation, storing release potential whose eventual discharge is sized by the accumulated gap, not by the trigger. 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.


Time asymmetry is one of three identity commitments of Supersession. A successor can displace a predecessor without the predecessor displacing the successor; swapping the relata changes the truth and the permitted action. Role continuity and explicit displacement are the additional supersession-specific structure.

Removing succession vocabulary leaves a directed relation whose two sides cannot be swapped: forward displacement is licensed and reversal is not.


Membership is decidable over an ordered pair in a role context and supports inverse lookup. The child adds role continuity, one-way loss of operative standing, preservation of the former occupant for history, and migration.

Supersession is a Relation specialized by predecessor, successor, shared role, explicit displacement, and a fixed temporal direction.


Both have a declared domain, codomain, and single-valued assignment. Surjectivity adds the strict differentia that the mapping's image equals its codomain, so every target has a preimage and none is orphaned. General Function Mappings may leave part of the codomain unhit, making this a strict taxonomic specialization.

Surjectivity is a Function Mapping specialized by the no-gap requirement that every element of the declared codomain is reached by at least one input.


Suspension is a specific three-phase state trajectory (prepared-consonant -> dissonant-held -> resolved) of a held element against a changed context — a specialization of state_and_state_transition. Low-medium: the prime has no clean is-a; this is the loosest defensible genus.


Every Swiss-cheese failure is an AND across state-conditional path edges: the route exists topologically, each layer normally blocks it, and catastrophe occurs only when all corresponding holes conduct together. The child narrows the genus to deliberately defensive layers, hazard penetration, latent/active holes, and the independence-versus-common-cause arithmetic that determines the value of additional layers.

The Swiss-cheese model is conjunctive path activation specialized to a hazard crossing serial defensive layers only when a hole in every layer aligns, with cross-layer hole correlation as the governing variable.


Swiss cheese model is a specific named instantiation of defense-in-depth's serial-imperfect-layers structure with hole-correlation framing. Defense In Depth supplies the genus: Stacking multiple independent protective layers between threat and asset so that only a correlated breach across all layers produces total loss. Swiss Cheese Model (Layered Defense with Aligning Holes) preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Catastrophe occurs only when a hazard finds a trajectory through a hole in every serial defensive layer at once, so the key variable is the correlation of holes across layers. 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 Swiss cheese model is 'redundancy WITH the independence assumption made explicit and challenged' — it foregrounds the hole-correlation structure redundancy buries. Presupposes stacked redundant layers; adds the decisive decorrelation variable. (defense_in_depth is the slogan it sharpens.). Redundancy supplies the prerequisite condition: Duplicate critical components. Swiss Cheese Model (Layered Defense with Aligning Holes) operates against that background: Catastrophe occurs only when a hazard finds a trajectory through a hole in every serial defensive layer at once, so the key variable is the correlation of holes across layers. 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.


Isolates the specific PER-TRANSITION overhead (unload/load/cold-start/residual-interference) of moving between stateful modes — a cost component presupposing a multi-mode stateful system that state_and_state_transition supplies. NOTE: this is the COGNITIVE/systems per-transition-overhead prime, not the economic asset-specificity sense in the cross-batch note. State and State Transition supplies the prerequisite condition: Captures system condition and evolution. Switching Cost operates against that background: Moving between stateful modes incurs a per-transition overhead — unload, load, cold-start, residual interference — that is structurally distinct from steady-state cost and dominates under frequent switching. 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.


Boundary is the conceptual structure marking the demarcation between an entity and what is outside it, governing flows, membership, and inclusion. Symbolic boundaries is the specific case where the demarcation is conceptual rather than physical or formal-legal: cultural distinctions deployed by social actors to sort the social field into kinds (insider/outsider, sacred/profane, authentic/fake) without physical partitioning, yet with substantial material consequences for inclusion and status. It inherits boundary's demarcation-and-permeability structure and adds the specification that the demarcation criterion is culturally encoded classification.

Symbolic boundaries is a specialization of boundary; the demarcation is a conceptual cultural distinction rather than a physical or legal partition.


Symbolic representation is a specialization of representation. The general pattern maps target onto medium under a stated convention so operations on the medium correspond to operations on the target. Symbolic representation instantiates this with the convention being collective and arbitrary rather than grounded in resemblance (iconic) or causal connection (indexical), as Peirce's tripartite typology identifies. The word, digit, or banknote refers by sustained communal commitment alone, making symbolic representation the structurally-particularized instance of representation where the mapping is conventionalized in shared use.

Symbolic representation is a specific kind of representation in which the sign-meaning correspondence is established by collective convention.


Input-to-consequence — the prime PRESUPPOSES an asymmetric state but adds a symmetric procedure, an axis misalignment, and a level-non-transitivity invariant. asymmetry is the input condition, not the pattern. Presupposes asymmetry. Asymmetry supplies the prerequisite condition: Directed imbalance in a relation whose two sides are not interchangeable under swap. Symmetric Response to Asymmetric State operates against that background: Equal treatment of an unequal state distorts toward the weaker side. 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.


Symmetry breaking presupposes symmetry because the phenomenon is defined as a system whose governing laws possess a symmetry yet whose actual state does not share it. Without symmetry's prior identification of the transformation group under which the laws are invariant, there is nothing to break: the broken-versus-unbroken distinction requires the symmetric reference, and the degenerate ground states among which the system selects are symmetry-related by the very group whose action is broken at the state level.

Symmetry breaking presupposes symmetry because the phenomenon is precisely the gap between symmetric governing laws and an asymmetric state.


Symmetry breaking typically presupposes a tipping point because spontaneous symmetry breaking proceeds through a bifurcation: as a control parameter crosses a critical value, the symmetric state loses stability and the system settles into one of several symmetry-related but distinct ground states. That sharp threshold between regimes, mediated by cooperative alignment, is exactly the tipping-point structure. The typical qualifier reflects that explicit symmetry breaking by an external perturbation does not require crossing a critical bifurcation; only the spontaneous variety strictly invokes the phase-transition mechanism.

Symmetry breaking typically presupposes a tipping point because spontaneous selection among degenerate ground states characteristically occurs at a critical threshold.


Synchronic vs. diachronic analysis presupposes time because the methodological distinction it draws — holding time fixed (cross-sectional structure) versus tracing it (evolution over duration) — is meaningless without time's ordered-succession structure as the dimension to either fix or unfold. It inherits time's commitment to a temporal axis with measurable duration and irreversible direction, particularized to the analytical-frame-choice case where the investigator selects which face of the temporal extent to foreground.

Synchronic vs. diachronic analysis presupposes time because the distinction is a methodological choice about whether to hold time fixed or trace it.


Synchronization is a specialization of coordination. The general coordination pattern aligns independently controlled actors so their actions combine coherently. Synchronization specializes by making the alignment variable specifically temporal: phase or frequency of oscillating or repeating processes, achieved through coupling or external forcing such that events co-occur or maintain stable phase relationships. The same align-independent-processes logic of coordination applies, with time as the specific dimension of alignment and entrainment as the specific mechanism distinguishing synchronization from other coordination forms.

Synchronization is a specialization of coordination in which alignment is achieved through timing — phase or frequency matching across processes.


Synchronization is a specialization of equilibrium. The general pattern is a balance condition on named quantities in which opposing fluxes cancel and no net change occurs along the balanced dimensions, even when local activity continues. Synchronization instantiates this with the balanced quantity being phase differences among coupled oscillators: when oscillators entrain, phase differences settle into a stable value (zero for full sync, fixed lag for phase-locking) that persists against small perturbations. The Kuramoto-style settling onto a fixed phase relation is an equilibrium in the rotating frame of the coupled-oscillator dynamics.

Synchronization is a specific kind of equilibrium where phase differences settle into a balanced steady relationship that persists against perturbation.


Synchronization is a specialization of recurrence. The general pattern is the property by which an event or value reappears across time, often with predictable spacing. Synchronization instantiates this with multiple oscillating or repeating processes whose individual recurrences become phase-locked to each other or to a common forcing signal; the recurring events are pulled into temporal alignment by local coupling or shared driver. It is recurrence operating across coupled oscillators rather than within a single process, producing the joint reappearance pattern that gives firefly flashing and circadian entrainment their structure.

Synchronization is a specific kind of recurrence where multiple oscillating processes align so events co-occur with stable phase relations.


The defining comparison asks whether the combined response can be recovered from an additive, multiplicative, or otherwise declared separable baseline. A non-zero interaction term is a failure of additivity or superposition, the exact structural property Nonlinearity supplies. The child specializes that failure to joint factors and signs the departure as synergistic or antagonistic.

Synergy and Antagonism is the interaction-effect species of Nonlinearity in which a joint response departs from the declared no-interaction baseline for the components acting separately.


System archetypes name recurring patterns of feedback loops and structures that produce characteristic system behavior across domains — limits to growth, shifting the burden, eroding goals, escalation, and others. Each archetype is constitutively a configuration of reinforcing and balancing loops; the diagnostic and intervention value comes from recognizing the loop structure beneath surface differences. Feedback supplies the underlying loop-closure structure that makes each archetype intelligible. Without feedback as a first-class structural object, the archetypes would have no shared substrate and would reduce to coincidental surface similarities.

System archetypes presupposes feedback because the recurring problematic dynamics they catalog are characteristic loop structures.


System archetypes is a specialization of recurrence: the same nine patterns (Limits to Growth, Shifting the Burden, Tragedy of the Commons, etc.) reappear across organizations, ecology, markets, and international relations because identical underlying loop structures generate identical characteristic dynamics. It inherits recurrence's structural property — pattern reappearance across instances with predictable behavior — and particularizes it to the feedback-topology case where what recurs is a stock-and-flow signature rather than a token event.

System archetypes are a kind of recurrence in which the same feedback-loop structures reappear across diverse domains producing characteristic behavior.


System archetypes catalog recurring patterns of feedback loops that produce characteristic problematic behavior across domains — Limits to Growth, Shifting the Burden, Tragedy of the Commons. Without systems thinking's machinery — the shift from element to relationship as the unit of analysis, with loops, stocks, flows, and circular causation as the modeling vocabulary — the archetypes would have no structural language in which to be expressed. Systems thinking supplies the loop-and-relationship lens that makes the archetypal structures recognizable as the same pattern across surface-different settings.

System archetypes presupposes systems thinking because the recurring loop-structure patterns are intelligible only within the relational-and-feedback unit of analysis.


System slack is a specialization of reserve in which the deliberately maintained surplus is uncommitted organizational capacity — time, budget, labor, processing headroom, inventory — held beyond immediate operational need. It inherits reserve's general structure of purposeful unused capacity available for variation, shock, or opportunity, and specializes by fixing the medium to organizational resources and the value proposition to enabling response to unexpected demand, innovation, and learning. The trade-off is the same general one — efficiency under nominal conditions versus resilience and optionality under uncertainty — applied to the firm's operating envelope.

System slack is a specialization of reserve in which the surplus is held in organizational time, budget, labor, or capacity above immediate operational need.


Boundary is the conceptual structure marking the demarcation between an entity and what is outside it, governing flows and crossing. Systemic fragmentation is the particular shape boundary takes when sub-system boundaries within a larger system become rigidly impermeable: information, resources, and decisions stop flowing across them, sub-units pursue divergent metrics, and the lost synergy degrades overall performance. It is a structurally-particularized instance of boundary in which the permeability has dropped too low at internal partitions, producing isolation costs the larger system absorbs.

Systemic fragmentation is the specific shape boundary takes when intra-system boundaries become rigid enough to block coordination across sub-units.


Systemic fragmentation is the failure mode of coordination: it diagnoses what happens when subsystems lack the shared protocols, synchronization mechanisms, and aligned incentives that coordination supplies. Without the prior commitment that distributed actors require active alignment to combine into a coherent collective outcome, there would be no notion of fragmentation as pathology — only independent units doing independent work. Fragmentation is intelligible only against the background expectation that coordination should be achieved and as a structural diagnosis of why it is not.

Systemic fragmentation presupposes coordination because fragmentation names the structural failure of the coordination infrastructure that aligns distributed units.


Systemic risk is the pattern in which one component's failure, propagated through interconnections, threatens the whole system, with risk a property of topology and coupling rather than of any component in isolation. This presupposes contagion: the contact-mediated, self-reproducing spread of a state from one element to a connected neighbour across a network. The cascading correlated collapse is contagion with default or failure as the transmitted state, governed by transmission rate and contact pattern. Without contagion's propagation mechanism, a localized shock would stay localized rather than becoming systemic.

Systemic risk presupposes contagion because system-wide failure propagates through contact-mediated transmission across the connection topology.


Systemic risk emerges from dense interdependence in which one component's failure propagates through interconnections to threaten the whole. This presupposes dependency: the directed relation in which one element cannot proceed, function, or retain value unless a condition on another is met. The cascade structure of systemic risk is precisely the dependency graph being traversed by failure: when A depends on B and B fails, A's continued functioning is no longer supported. Without dependency's directed asymmetric relation, failures would not propagate along predictable paths and the systemic topology would have no failure dimension.

Systemic risk presupposes dependency because component-failure cascades require a directed relation in which one element relies on another.


Systemic risk is the structural pattern in which one component's failure, propagated through tight interconnections, threatens the whole — so the relevant risk is a property of the system's topology and coupling, not of any component alone. The diagnosis only makes sense against a network: a set of entities with pairwise connections whose structure governs reachability, cascade dynamics, and correlated failure modes. Without the network as a first-class object of analysis, there would be no coupling pattern through which local shocks could propagate and no topology distinguishing fragile from robust configurations.

Systemic risk presupposes network because cascading whole-system failure depends on the topology and coupling of interconnected components.


Systems thinking presupposes emergence because its stance — that the whole's behavior is governed by relationships and feedback rather than by parts in isolation — is precisely an emergence commitment at the systems level. It inherits emergence's structural claim that higher-level descriptions have explanatory or causal vocabulary that does not reduce to lower-level descriptions, and operationalizes it through loop-and-stock modeling. The recurring frustration with well-intentioned interventions is precisely the diagnostic that emergent dynamics are being ignored.

Systems thinking presupposes emergence because it treats whole-level behavior as irreducible to component-level properties.


Systems thinking presupposes feedback because its defining analytical commitment is to shift the unit of analysis from elements to loops — modeling circular causation, delay, and stock-and-flow structure rather than linear chains. It inherits feedback's structural arrangement in which a system's output becomes a driver of its own subsequent input, treating this closure as the dominant causal pattern to be diagnosed. Without feedback's loop-closure structure, systems thinking would collapse to ordinary causal analysis.

Systems thinking presupposes feedback because its core analytical move is to model loops and circular causation rather than linear cause–effect chains.


Systems thinking is the stance that behavior of a whole is governed by relationships and feedback among its parts rather than by parts in isolation, requiring modeling of interconnection, delay, and circular causation. The stance presupposes that the system can be represented as a connection pattern where structure carries explanatory power — entities together with pairwise links whose topology governs flows and dynamics. Network supplies precisely that first-class object. Without networks as a substrate of relationships-as-the-unit-of-analysis, systems thinking's shift from elements to interconnections would have no formal target to model.

Systems thinking presupposes network because shifting analysis from elements to relationships and feedback requires viewing the system as a connection pattern.


Taboo cannot operate without the sacred because its defining features — absolute interdiction, contagious pollution, and dread or disgust at violation rather than ordinary disapproval — are intelligible only as protections of a domain marked off as inviolable. The sacred supplies the categorical set-apartness and the contagion logic that taboo enforces; without a sacred-profane partition, the prohibitions reduce to ordinary rules with proportionate sanctions and lose the qualitatively distinct emotional charge that makes them taboos.

Taboo presupposes the sacred because its absolute prohibitions and contamination-anxiety only make sense as defenses of a set-apart sacred order.


Task interdependence is a kind of dependency specialized to work-system tasks: the directed reliance is between activities whose completion, quality, or timing requires inputs, outputs, resources, or decisions from other tasks. It inherits dependency's general commitment that one element relies on another being present, prior, compatible, or supplied, and supplies the specific case where the elements are tasks and the typology of reliance — pooled, sequential, reciprocal — sets coordination requirements proportional to the coupling intensity that the underlying dependency relation creates.

Task interdependence is a specialization of dependency in which the directed reliance is between coupled tasks in a work system.


Task interdependence is the workflow-particularized form network takes: the entities are tasks and the connections are the dependencies through which one task's outputs, resources, or decisions feed another. Where network names a set of entities with pairwise connections studied at the level of connection pattern generally, task interdependence fixes the node type (tasks), the edge type (input-output, resource, information dependencies), and the analytic focus (Thompson's pooled-sequential-reciprocal typology) — a particular shape of network structure in work systems.

Task interdependence is the specific shape network takes when the nodes are tasks and the edges are workflow couplings of inputs, outputs, and resources.


Intervention Stack Accretion supplies the genus: A system accumulates concurrently active interventions, each justified at add-time, whose joint cost grows super-linearly and whose removal requires a distinct named operation. Technical Debt preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A present expedient choice imposes a future cost that compounds with system growth until it is paid down, with a principal, an interest payment, and a pay-down. 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.

Technical Debt is typically a specialization of Intervention Stack Accretion, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Teleconnection is a specialization of coupling in which the dynamic link is non-local: distant regions or systems co-vary not through direct adjacency but because both participate in a shared large-scale process or network. It inherits the general coupling commitment that a change in one part produces a change in another through a specifiable interaction mechanism, and specializes by fixing the spatial geometry to non-contiguous separation and the mechanism to a shared global mediator that couples regions that have no local pathway between them.

Teleconnection is a specialization of coupling in which the linkage holds between spatially separated regions through a shared global mechanism.


A teleconnection is a specialization of dependency: distant regions, populations, or systems are not autonomous because the state at one location is conditional on a shared mechanism that couples it to another. It inherits dependency's directed-asymmetric relation — A's condition affects B's behavior — particularized to the non-local case where the dependency travels via a global process rather than direct contact. The El Niño–monsoon link is precisely a dependency edge in the climate network.

A teleconnection is a kind of dependency in which distant regions are not independent because a shared mechanism couples them.


A teleconnection is a specialization of network: the persistent statistical or dynamical link between spatially separated regions is precisely an edge in a network whose topology connects nodes that are not in direct local contact, with the connection mediated by a shared global process. It inherits network's commitment that structure — who is connected to whom, with what weights and directions — carries explanatory power, particularized to the climatic and geographic case where the link is non-local but persistent.

A teleconnection is a kind of network relation in which distant nodes co-vary because both participate in a shared global mechanism.


Non-Locality supplies the genus: Distant elements influence or correlate with each other without a chain of contiguous intervening contact — coupling that jumps the substrate rather than propagating through neighbors. Teleconnection preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Distant relationships via shared dynamics. 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.

Teleconnection is a specialization of Non-Locality, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.