It is 'the sharper structural claim' / 'a powerful special case' of scale-dependent reasoning — in the limit behaviour collapses to a small ordered lattice of growth classes. Scaling and Scale Dependence supplies the genus: Patterns and constraints change qualitatively across different scales. Asymptotic Behavior preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: In the limit, only the dominant term matters, so behavior is classified by growth class rather than exact value and small or fast-decaying contributions are discarded. 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.


Attentional capacity names the finite pool of selective-attention bandwidth a bounded agent can deploy at one moment. It presupposes the prior pattern of attention itself: the selective allocation of a limited cognitive resource that gates which inputs are processed deeply. Without attention as a gating mechanism enforcing scarcity, there is no resource-pool to measure and no characteristic failure modes (interference, slowing, capture) to predict. Attentional capacity quantifies the bound that attention's framing already commits to as absolute.

Attentional capacity presupposes attention because it is the resource-pool measure of attention's selective bandwidth.


Attentional_capacity is 'one instance among many' of the substrate-free throughput bound (alongside copper wires, axons, court dockets). channel_capacity is the general parent; attentional_capacity is the cognitive specialization. Add channel_capacity as a parent of attentional_capacity. Channel Capacity supplies the genus: Any information-bearing medium has a hard upper bound on reliable throughput that effort cannot exceed. Attentional Capacity preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Finite pool of selection bandwidth whose exceeded supply degrades processing through interference, slowing, or capture. 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.


Attestation binds identity to evidence via a verifiable tamper-evident mark, which is exactly authentication's evidence-binding structure specialized to non-repudiable marks. Authentication supplies the genus: Binding an asserted identity or origin to admissible evidence through a procedure that yields a verdict, before trust, access, or weight is granted. Attestation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A verifiable, principal-binding, tamper-evident mark lets a third party confirm who committed to what. 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.


Attractor selection and basin control directs a system's long-term dynamics toward one of multiple possible stable states by manipulating initial conditions, boundary conditions, or basin geometry. This presupposes equilibrium: the state in which opposing forces balance so no net change occurs along balanced dimensions, with stability defined by Lyapunov-style criteria for whether perturbations decay. The attractors are precisely such stable equilibria, and the basins are the regions of state space whose trajectories converge to them. Without equilibrium's framework of balanced steady states with characterized stability, there is no attractor for control to select toward.

Attractor selection and basin control presupposes equilibrium because the attractors being selected are stable equilibrium states in the system's dynamics.


Attractor selection and basin control directs a system's long-term dynamics toward one of multiple stable states by manipulating initial conditions or shifting basin boundaries in state space. The mechanism only makes sense within a state-and-state-transition framework: states are the points in the dynamic landscape, the transition relation defines flows, and attractors are subsets toward which trajectories converge. Without an underlying state space with transition dynamics, there are no basins to reshape and no attractors to select among. The control operation is parasitic on the state-machine structure.

Attractor selection and basin control presupposes state and state transition because shifting which basin a trajectory falls into requires a state space with attractors.


Auction theory presupposes allocation because its subject matter is the assignment of scarce items — licenses, contracts, art, financial instruments — to claimants whose willingness to pay differs and is privately known. Without allocation's prior structure of dividing limited supply among competing demands, there is no problem for an auction format to solve. Auction theory inherits the general allocation problem and supplies a family of rule structures — English, Dutch, sealed-bid, double, combinatorial — that turn bids into assignments, then studies how format choice affects efficiency, revenue, information revelation, and collusion-resistance of the resulting allocation.

Auction theory presupposes allocation because auctions are mechanisms for assigning scarce items to claimants under a specified rule.


Auction theory is a specialization of mechanism design in which the desired outcome is allocation of a small set of items and the rule structure is restricted to bid-based formats that extract private valuations through competitive offers. It inherits mechanism design's general inversion — start with the desired equilibrium, search for rules implementing it under private information and self-interest — and specializes by fixing the implementation class to auctions. The analysis then asks which auction format induces equilibrium bidding strategies that deliver efficiency, revenue, or robustness, treating format as a design variable subject to the general mechanism-design framework.

Auction theory is a specialization of mechanism design focused on rules that allocate items by extracting and comparing private bids.


Prime explicitly self-describes as distinguished from "standard delegation" by the uncertainty condition — a genuine subtype of delegation of authority. Delegation of Authority supplies the genus: Assign responsibility. Authority Delegation Under Uncertainty preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Preposition decision authority at operational levels for contingencies. 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.


Authority handoff is the transition PROTOCOL by which a role's binding authority (plus its operational state) moves between occupants without breaking; it presupposes authority (the thing transferred). Authority is the state, handoff the transition.


autonomy is a claim about WHERE directive right sits (on the inner side of a scoped boundary); it presupposes authority as the substance whose location it specifies.

Autonomy is a claim about WHERE directive right sits (on the inner side of a scoped boundary); it presupposes authority as the substance whose location it specifies.


Autopoiesis is the structural pattern of self-production in which a system continuously produces the components that compose it, with a boundary distinguishing it from its environment that is itself produced and maintained by the same internal processes. This presupposes boundary: the conceptual structure marking demarcation between an entity and what is outside, with the demarcation criterion, permeability, and bounded entity as integrated components. Without boundary's framing of operative inside-outside separation, the autopoietic system has no inside to maintain and no outside against which to distinguish itself, and self-production has nothing to be self about.

Autopoiesis presupposes boundary because the self-producing system's identity requires a boundary that distinguishes it from its environment and is itself produced internally.


Autopoiesis is a specialization of homeostasis. The general pattern is closed-loop self-regulation holding key variables within bands against disturbances via sensor-comparator-actuator feedback. Autopoiesis instantiates this with the regulated variable being the network of processes that produces the system's own components: the system continuously regenerates the parts that produce the network that produces them. The homeostatic loop is recursive, regulating the existence of the regulator itself rather than a separately-specified variable like temperature or glucose. It is homeostasis directed at the system's own constitutive process rather than a downstream physiological variable.

Autopoiesis is a specific kind of homeostasis where the regulated variable is the system's own component-production network maintaining its identity.


Autopoiesis is a specialization of reflexivity in which the self-referential loop runs through production rather than observation: the system's components are produced by the network of processes whose persistence requires those components, so identity is constituted by the self-sustaining production loop. It inherits the general reflexivity commitment that a system's operations on itself become inputs that shape its own behavior, and specializes by making the operation component production and the closure the boundary-maintaining cycle that distinguishes the system from its environment.

Autopoiesis is a specialization of reflexivity in which the system's components produce the very network of processes that produces them.


Axiom is another single mode (foundationally-true-within-a-system, do-not-refute-from-within). One value of the mode dimension. Epistemic Mode Of A Proposition supplies the genus: The same proposition can be held in different epistemic modes — asserted-fact, assumption, axiom, hypothesis, premise, belief, conjecture — and the mode, independent of the content, gates which operations are licensed on it: you may provisionally rely on an assumption, must test a hypothesis, cannot refute an axiom within its system, must discharge a premise. Axiom preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A claim a system declines to derive — a load-bearing starting point accepted without proof so that the rest of the structure can be built on top of it. 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.

Axiom is a specialization of Epistemic Mode Of A Proposition, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Backcasting is a specialization of foresight whose distinctive move is starting from a defined desirable future endpoint and reasoning backward through the precursor conditions, milestones, and choices required to reach it from the present. It inherits foresight's commitment to structured anticipation that turns the future into an object of disciplined inquiry shaping present action, and supplies the specific normative-trajectory component of the methods stack — contrasting with forecasting and scenario exploration by treating the future state as given and the path to it as the inquiry.

Backcasting is a specific foresight method that fixes a desired future state and works backward to identify required precursor steps.


Modal reasoning evaluates claims across a structured space of alternative possibilities, asking what must, might, or would be the case across accessible alternatives. Backcasting is the particular shape this reasoning takes in foresight practice: a desired future state is fixed as an anchor, and the reasoner traces backward through possible trajectories that could reach it, identifying necessary intermediate conditions and decision points. It is a structurally-particularized instance of possibility-space navigation in which the target world is held fixed and the accessibility relation is run in reverse from future to present.

Backcasting is the specific shape modal reasoning takes when one fixes a desired future state and works backward through possible paths to the present.


Backpressure is a specific negative-feedback loop whose controlled variable is capacity-headroom and whose effect is to throttle production toward the bottleneck rate — a specialization of feedback (the genus, which also covers positive/non-throttling loops). Feedback supplies the genus: Outputs influence inputs. Backpressure preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A return signal from a downstream stage throttles upstream production to its own capacity, converting a one-way push into a two-way conversation that holds the system at the bottleneck's throughput instead of accumulating hidden queue debt. 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.


Backtracking is a disciplined SEARCH strategy (a navigated decision tree with rollback); a specialization of the general search problem. Search and Retrieval supplies the genus: Locate and extract information. Backtracking preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Extend a partial solution one step at a time and reverse the most recent commitment as soon as a constraint proves it cannot succeed, preserving earlier work. 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.


Bargaining power is an asymmetry specialized to unequal credible exit, delay, and replacement options that shifts attainable terms between actors. Both require a role exchange that does not preserve the operative relation: swapping the actors changes their available alternatives, dependence, and ability to determine the result. Bargaining power fixes the asymmetric quantity to the cost and credibility of nonagreement options and requires that disparity to affect negotiated, posted, or settled terms.


Baseline deviation is an observation placed in a shared frame against a declared reference and read off as a departure — a comparison specialized to (observation vs reference), promoting the departure to a first-class published fact. Presupposes comparison as the underlying place-in-shared-frame operation.


A Basis is definitionally a generating set whose members are selected from a space and whose identity is determined by binary membership. It inherits collection-as-object and element identity, then adds a combining rule, spanning, independence, and minimality. Ordinary sets need not generate a space or satisfy those constraints, so the parent remains broader.

Every Basis is a Set and Membership structure specialized by spanning, independence, and minimality relative to a combining rule.


Batch processing is an operational practice that presupposes and exploits a chosen batch-size parameter; it uses the tradeoff curve rather than being a kind of size. Batch Size supplies the prerequisite condition: The granularity at which a stream of work is grouped, trading setup cost amortised per item against flow, delay, risk, and feedback-lag costs that rise with the group — producing an interior optimum. Batch Processing operates against that background: Collect many discrete work-items so a costly setup is paid once and amortised over the group, trading lower per-item cost for higher per-item latency. 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.


Batch size is a specific structured trade-off — a fixed-per-batch cost that amortizes against a per-item flow cost that rises, with a convex U-shaped total-cost curve (EOQ sqrt law) plus coupling-of-fate and feedback-lag riders. A computable specialization of the generic trade-off schema. Trade-offs supplies the genus: Balancing competing priorities. Batch Size preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: The granularity at which a stream of work is grouped, trading setup cost amortised per item against flow, delay, risk, and feedback-lag costs that rise with the group — producing an interior optimum. 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.


It inherits precision weighting's rule that evidence influence scales with estimated inverse variance, then adds the differentia of parallel, partly independent cues to one latent quantity and the reciprocal-of-summed-precisions variance result. Precision weighting also applies outside that parallel-cue case.

Bayesian cue integration is precision weighting specialized to several partly independent simultaneous cues about one latent quantity, with inverse-variance fusion and a lower-variance combined estimate.


Conditional Probability supplies the prerequisite condition: Re-normalize a probability measure to the information context that is taken as given. Bayesian Updating operates against that background: Update beliefs with evidence. 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.

Bayesian Updating typically presupposes Conditional Probability, whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


Bayesian updating revises a prior probability distribution over hypotheses by combining it with the likelihood of new evidence, producing a posterior whose conclusions go beyond what the evidence logically guarantees and retain explicit residual uncertainty. That is the defining structure of Inductive Reasoning — ampliative inference from particular observations to broader generalizations with characteristic uncertainty. Bayesian updating specializes induction by supplying a formal calculus for the credit-and-debit of belief across hypotheses given new data.

Bayesian Updating is a kind of inductive reasoning: it ampliatively revises beliefs from particular evidence toward broader conclusions.


Bayesian updating presupposes probability because the entire mechanism -- prior, likelihood, posterior, evidence -- is defined as probability distributions whose combination follows Bayes' theorem within Kolmogorov's axioms. The graded uncertainty Bayesian inference maintains across hypotheses is a probability assignment over a sample space; the conditioning operation that produces the posterior is probability's conditioning rule. Without probability's apparatus of coherent numerical weights, additivity, and conditioning, there is no prior to update and no posterior to compute; Bayesian updating is probability theory's central inference move. Probability supplies the prerequisite condition: Quantifies uncertainty and likelihoods. Bayesian Updating operates against that background: Update beliefs with evidence. 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.

Bayesian updating presupposes probability because the prior-times-likelihood-equals-posterior rule operates on probability distributions over hypotheses.


The strategy begins from resources insufficient for the large target and gains leverage by concentrating them where they can cross a local dominance threshold. If the whole territory can be taken and consolidated at once, the narrow entry, staged consolidation, and converting-adjacency logic are no longer a beachhead response.

A beachhead presupposes resources too scarce to dominate the full target at once, making concentration on a narrow winnable foothold necessary.


Interpretation supplies the genus: Recover meaning from a representational substrate under a framework that makes some readings available and others not. Belief Formation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Commitment-transition by which an agent comes to hold a proposition as true and act accordingly. 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.

Belief Formation is a specialization of Interpretation, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


A bijection retains the declared domain, codomain, and single-valued rule of Function Mapping, then requires both injectivity and surjectivity. Most functions fail one or both requirements, so Bijectivity is the strict reversible specialization rather than a synonym for mapping.

Bijectivity is a Function Mapping specialized by the conjunction of no collisions and no gaps, which yields a unique inverse.


The bijective conjunction requires distinct inputs to land on distinct outputs. Without that invariant, every target may still be reached, but multiple sources can collide and the inverse is not uniquely defined. Injectivity is therefore a strict constituent inside Bijectivity, not a broader object that contains it.

Bijectivity contains Injectivity as its no-collision half; removing distinctness preservation leaves a surjection rather than a bijection.


The bijective conjunction requires every declared target to have a source. Without that invariant, collisions may still be absent, but unused codomain elements prevent a two-sided inverse over the declared collections. Surjectivity is therefore the second strict constituent inside Bijectivity.

Bijectivity contains Surjectivity as its no-gap half; removing full codomain coverage leaves an injection rather than a bijection.


Binding is the inverse problem created by successful decomposition: features have already been extracted along separate channels, and no one channel retains the information needed to reconstruct which features belonged together. Without that prior separation there is no lost pairing to recover and therefore no binding problem, although binding is not itself a kind of decomposition.

The binding problem arises only after a whole's features have been separated into independently processed streams whose original co-occurrence must be recovered.


Progressive concentration of a substance = a stock integrating uptake minus clearance; the biological instance of the stock-flow integral. Add accumulation as a parent; keep aggregation;asymmetry;flow.


Bioaccumulation is a specialization of aggregation in which the items being collapsed into a unified summary are successive intakes of a substance and the retained quantity is the net body burden over time. It inherits the general aggregation commitment that many granular inputs are reduced into a single composite measure that captures chosen features while suppressing item-level detail. Its specialization is that the aggregating function is biological retention: intakes minus elimination accumulate into a single concentration variable whose value carries the toxicologically relevant information.

Bioaccumulation is a specialization of aggregation in which the items collapsed into a summary are repeated intakes of a substance and the retained feature is total body burden.


Bioaccumulation is the buildup of a substance in an organism because uptake from the environment exceeds the rates of metabolic clearance and excretion. The phenomenon depends on a directed imbalance between two coupled fluxes — intake and outflow are not interchangeable, and swapping their magnitudes reverses the outcome. That is the structure of Asymmetry: a relation whose two sides are not exchangeable, with one privileged or larger than the other. Bioaccumulation presupposes asymmetry as the kinetic condition that makes net accumulation possible.

Bioaccumulation presupposes Asymmetry: it requires intake to exceed elimination, a directed imbalance between two coupled rates.


Bioaccumulation presupposes flow because it describes the structural condition in which a substance enters an organism faster than it is metabolized, excreted, or otherwise eliminated, producing net buildup over time. The very notion of accumulation requires the prior availability of directional transfer of a quantity across the organism's boundary, with rates of entry and exit, conservation, and sinks. Flow supplies that general transport apparatus; bioaccumulation is what happens when inflow systematically outruns outflow in a biological compartment.

Bioaccumulation presupposes flow because it names the net retention that occurs when an inflow of a substance exceeds the organism's outflow capacity.


Accumulation supplies the genus: A stock grows or shrinks as the time-integral of its net inflow minus outflow, so stocks and flows live on different objects and cannot be equated. Biofouling preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Opportunistic matter accumulates at a working interface, charging a cost for occupation, not activity. 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.

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


The birthday problem is a specific named consequence of probability — the sqrt(K) saturation of match-any-pair events, driven by quadratic pair-counting. Presupposes the probability machinery it specializes (it is 'one named consequence', not the subject).


The black-box / white-box distinction names the methodological choice between treating a system's internals as unknowable or irrelevant versus specifying them in detail. The choice is constitutively about what structure to retain for a purpose: black-box analysis keeps only input-output behavior; white-box analysis keeps the mechanism. Abstraction supplies the underlying operation — purpose-relative retention of structure, with explicit decisions about what is kept and what is dropped. The black-box/white-box distinction specializes abstraction by naming two canonical retention policies and the methodological tradeoffs between them for prediction, control, and explanation.

Black-box / white-box distinction presupposes abstraction because choosing whether to expose internal mechanism is a purpose-relative decision about retained structure.


Black swan reasoning presupposes foresight because identifying high-impact, low-probability events that fall outside standard expectations requires an anticipatory stance that explicitly maps uncertainty and the limits of one's operative models. Without foresight's commitment to structured anticipation of plural futures, weak signals, and the inadequacy of single-point prediction, there is no frame in which the black-swan category is meaningful — it would simply collapse into unforeseen accident. Foresight supplies the disciplined inquiry into tail uncertainty that makes the black-swan concept operationally usable for preparing under fundamental unpredictability.

Black swan reasoning presupposes foresight because it requires a disciplined anticipatory stance to bound the unbounded space of high-impact surprises.


Uncertainty is the structural condition of incomplete or contested knowledge, including deep uncertainty where the space of possibilities is not fully characterized. Black swans are the particular shape this condition takes for events that combine apparent rarity given operative models, outsized impact, and retrospective predictability. They live in the deep-uncertainty band — outside the model's anticipated tail — and become subject to post-hoc rationalization. A structurally-particularized instance of uncertainty whose specific signature is model-misspecification at the tail combined with impact disproportionate to anticipated routine variance.

Black swans are the specific shape uncertainty takes for high-impact events that fall outside prior models and get rationalized only after they occur.


Blinding is the experiment-design/bias-control specialization (sever the treatment-assignment channel to the evaluator). Selective Information Severance supplies the genus: Deliberately cutting an information channel on a need-to-know basis, so a party cannot act on, be biased by, or leak information it never receives. Blinding preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Deliberately withholding a specific piece of information from a decision-maker so a downstream judgment cannot be contaminated by it — a targeted severance of a bias channel. 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.


Without the time-integrated stock behind the barrier, release magnitude cannot exceed the original flow rate and the defining deferred peak disappears. Accumulation supplies an internal constituent: A stock grows or shrinks as the time-integral of its net inflow minus outflow, so stocks and flows live on different objects and cannot be equated. Blockage Release Dynamics requires that role within this mechanism: A barrier stores accumulating flow until it fails, converting steady load into a single discontinuous release far larger than the original flow. Remove the parent-role and the child loses a required internal operation, even though the parent can exist outside the child. The child is therefore built from the parent rather than being a taxonomic kind of it.

Blockage-release dynamics contains growth of a stored upstream load as net inflow exceeds outflow.


Without a moving quantity intercepted by the barrier, there is nothing to impound, accumulate, temporally compress, or discharge downstream. Flow supplies an internal constituent: Structured movement of energy, matter, or information. Blockage Release Dynamics requires that role within this mechanism: A barrier stores accumulating flow until it fails, converting steady load into a single discontinuous release far larger than the original flow. Remove the parent-role and the child loses a required internal operation, even though the parent can exist outside the child. The child is therefore built from the parent rather than being a taxonomic kind of it.

Blockage-release dynamics contains a flow that would otherwise pass continuously through the system.


Without a critical capacity, overtopping, breach, rupture, or removal does not produce the abrupt state boundary that ends storage and begins release. Threshold supplies an internal constituent: Safe vs harmful levels. Blockage Release Dynamics requires that role within this mechanism: A barrier stores accumulating flow until it fails, converting steady load into a single discontinuous release far larger than the original flow. Remove the parent-role and the child loses a required internal operation, even though the parent can exist outside the child. The child is therefore built from the parent rather than being a taxonomic kind of it.

Blockage-release dynamics contains a barrier-capacity threshold that separates holding from discontinuous discharge.


Blocking partitions experimental units into groups matched on a known nuisance variable, so that comparisons of treatments occur within blocks where that variable is held effectively constant — neutralizing its capacity to confound. Without confounding's machinery — the principle that third variables associated with both treatment and outcome distort the causal estimate — there would be no diagnosis identifying which variables to block on and no rationale for the within-block comparison structure. Confounding supplies the bias mechanism that blocking is specifically engineered to counter.

Blocking presupposes confounding because the technique exists specifically to neutralize known nuisance variables that would otherwise confound the treatment effect.


Blocking is the particular form experimental design takes when the investigator already knows the population is heterogeneous along an identifiable nuisance dimension. By partitioning units into matched groups and running each treatment within every block, blocking removes that variability from the error term rather than leaving it as noise, sharpening the causal estimate. The general architecture of principled comparison under randomization is here specialized to handle known systematic heterogeneity through stratified assignment, preserving exchangeability within blocks while controlling between-block variance.

Blocking is the specific shape experimental design takes when known nuisance variability is absorbed by stratifying units before randomization.


Bloom_and_bust is the POPULATION-LEVEL instance of the arc (explosive growth on an abundant input then self-poisoning crash); overshoot_and_collapse is the general genus. Overshoot and Collapse supplies the genus: An enabling input that is beneficial at low levels crosses an assimilation ceiling and inverts into a self-amplifying degrading load, depleting a secondary resource and locking in a hysteretic worse regime that does not reverse when the input is removed. Bloom And Bust Cycle preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Saturating growth collapses, and the collapse itself becomes a second, often larger, stressor. 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 minimal seed does not jump directly to the finished system. It produces a capability that is fed back as an input to produce the next capability, repeating the same self-lifting relation across stages. Without recursive reuse of prior-stage output, the process is ordinary initialization from an external scaffold rather than bootstrapping.

Bootstrapping presupposes recursion because each stage must use products of an earlier stage to construct the next stage until the target system can sustain itself.


A bottleneck is the specific shape constraint takes in a chained-throughput system: the binding restriction is localized to a single stage whose capacity caps the aggregate rate, so improvements anywhere else fall outside the feasible-gain set. Where constraint names any binding restriction on admissible configurations, bottleneck particularizes it to serial or networked production, where the slowest element defines the feasible throughput envelope. Relieving non-bottleneck elements is structurally non-binding; only the bottleneck moves the global rate, making it the operative constraint.

A bottleneck is the specific shape a constraint takes when one stage's limited capacity binds the throughput of an entire pipeline.


Cut supplies the genus: A partition of a network's vertices and the crossing edges, converting global connectivity into a local edge-set. Bottleneck preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: The single limiting stage that caps an entire system's throughput. 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.

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


A bottleneck presupposes dependency because the binding-local-constraint-governs-global-rate signature only obtains where operations are linked by directed reliance into chains or networks. Without dependency's structure — one stage cannot proceed unless its upstream input is supplied — there is no chain whose throughput could be capped by its slowest link, and improving non-bottleneck elements would not be wasted. Dependency supplies the coupling that makes throughput a system property rather than a sum of independent rates; the bottleneck is then the specific node where that coupling becomes the binding constraint.

A bottleneck presupposes dependency because the slowest-element-governs-the-whole pattern only obtains in a chain of dependent operations.


Emergence is the appearance, at a higher level of organization, of properties not attributable to lower-level constituents and not trivially predictable from them. Bottom-up perspectives is typically the specific shape this pattern takes in analytical and governance practice: many distributed local inputs aggregate into a higher-level system, product, or policy that is itself an emergent artifact rather than a pre-specified design. It is a structurally-particularized instance of emergence whose specific machinery is aggregation of local contributions, though some bottom-up practices are coordinated rather than emergent, hence typical.

Bottom-up perspectives is typically the specific shape emergence takes when distributed local contributions aggregate into a higher-level account without central design.


Boundary critique is the reflective practice of surfacing and questioning the implicit choice of what counts as inside versus outside a system analysis, which structurally requires that a boundary is already operative or proposed. Without the boundary prime's substrate — a demarcation between an entity and what is outside it, with attendant flows, membership, and accountability — there would be nothing for the critique to inspect, no normative or strategic stakes in where the line is drawn, and no alternative boundaries to consider.

Boundary critique presupposes boundary because the reflective questioning of inside-versus-outside choices requires a prior boundary to be drawn and made explicit.


Reflexivity is the pattern in which a system's observations or models about itself become inputs that shape its own behavior, producing a self-referential loop between description and described. Boundary critique is the particular shape this move takes for systems analysis: every analysis depends on an implicit choice of what is inside the system, and the analysis must turn back on that choice, surfacing and questioning the boundary judgment as part of the work. A structurally-particularized instance of reflexivity in which the self-reference is the analyst's framing choice being made an object of the analysis itself.

Boundary critique is the specific shape reflexivity takes when an analysis turns back on its own implicit choice of system boundary.


The card is attached at an artifact's reuse boundary so that a downstream consumer encounters the disclosure at the decision point. Interface supplies that producer-consumer crossing, while the card is the disclosure surface attached there rather than the operative contract governing interaction.

A Boundary Disclosure Card typically presupposes the producer-consumer reuse interface at which its standardized facts must be encountered.


The shared disclosure schema selects origin, lineage, or custody as a load-bearing fact for safe reuse.

When origin matters for safe reuse, the card carries a provenance slot alongside contents, limits, hazards, expiry, or dependencies. The live identity requires a small selected fact set but does not require provenance specifically; a valid nutrition, capability, or hazard card can omit origin.

A Boundary Disclosure Card contains Provenance when its schema includes origin or lineage among the facts attached to the reusable artifact.


It inherits unintended passage beyond a containment scope and adds an adjacent audience, its independent receiver-side calculus, and overflow of an apparatus sized only for the target audience.

Boundary signal spillover is leakage specialized to a signal escaping its intended audience boundary through a permeable carrier.


The loss event is defined at a transition between carriers or contexts; remove the boundary and there is no handoff at which encoding capacity can discard state, although the boundary is the site rather than the loss itself.

Boundary state loss requires a carrier boundary across which a bounded artifact must convey state.


Constraint is a condition that restricts admissible configurations or choices to those satisfying it, with the feasible set as a first-class object of analysis. Bounded rationality is the particular shape this pattern takes when the restrictions act not on physical configurations but on the cognitive, informational, and computational resources available to a decision-maker. The agent's choice process is bounded by binding limits on these resources, producing local search and aspiration-based stopping. A structurally-particularized instance of constraint whose specific binding dimensions are cognition, information, and time.

Bounded rationality is the specific shape constraint takes when the binding restrictions act on cognitive, informational, and time resources of decision-makers.


Bounded rationality is the structural claim that real decision-makers operate under binding limits on information, capacity, and time that shape their choice processes. The claim only has content where a decision is being made — an agent selecting among alternatives under constraint. Decision supplies the act of selecting one alternative from a set, committing future resources, and closing off other paths; bounded rationality presupposes that selection event as its subject matter, then specifies that real agents do not perform it as unconstrained optimizers but as satisficers searching local neighborhoods.

Bounded rationality presupposes decision because it describes how real decision-makers operate under cognitive and informational constraints.


Framing supplies the prerequisite condition: Presentation shapes perception. Bracketing operates against that background: Deliberately suspending a held frame from operative use within a scoped inquiry. 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.

Bracketing typically presupposes Framing, whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


Braess's paradox is about the GAP between the selfish equilibrium and the social optimum, and how added capacity widens it — a property of equilibrium SELECTION over load-sensitive edges. Presupposes equilibrium (it is not equilibrium itself but a phenomenon of its selection).


'Branch-and-bound is backtracking PLUS bounding' — the same commit-check-rollback skeleton augmented with an optimisation bound. backtracking is the base/genus, branch_and_bound the optimisation child. Add backtracking as parent (additive; branch_and_bound keeps optimization;decomposition). Backtracking supplies the genus: Extend a partial solution one step at a time and reverse the most recent commitment as soon as a constraint proves it cannot succeed, preserving earlier work. Branch and Bound preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Systematic search with pruning. 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.


Branch and bound is the specific shape decomposition takes when applied to combinatorial optimization. The general decomposition pattern breaks a whole into constituent parts such that the parts, properly combined, reconstitute the whole and enable independent analysis. Branch and bound instantiates this by recursively partitioning the solution space into subsets (branches), computing bounds on each subset's optimal value, and pruning subsets whose bound proves they cannot contain the optimum. The decomposition is into mutually exclusive subsets that together cover the original space, with bounding supplying the structural reason that allows whole regions to be dismissed without exploration.

Branch and bound is the specific shape decomposition takes for combinatorial optimization, partitioning the solution space into prunable subsets.


Branch and bound is a specialization of optimization in which the search apparatus is implicit enumeration: the feasible set is recursively partitioned (branching), upper and lower bounds on the optimal objective within each subset are computed (bounding), and subsets provably unable to contain the optimum are pruned. It inherits the general optimization commitment of finding the best element of a specified set under stated constraints with respect to a stated objective, and specializes by giving that search the divide-and-conquer-plus-pruning shape that drives modern integer and mixed-integer programming solvers.

Branch and bound is a specialization of optimization that implicitly enumerates the feasible set by recursive partitioning and bound-driven pruning.


Branching and merging operates on a substrate of identifiable system states and rule-governed transitions between them: a fork is a transition that produces two child states from a parent, and a merge is a transition that reconciles two parent states into one child. The pattern cannot exist without the underlying commitment that the system has a state space and a transition relation; the fork-and-merge operations are themselves a specific structure imposed on that more general state-transition machinery.

Branching and merging presupposes state and state transition because forks and merges are operations that take prior states to new states.


Branching and merging requires that distinct states of an artifact be separately identifiable, retrievable, and comparable, because a fork creates a divergent parallel state that must coexist with the trunk and a merge must reconcile two prior states into one. Without versioning's stable identifiers, retained history, and computable differences between states, there is no substrate on which divergence and reconvergence operate — the fork would have nothing to address and the merge would have no priors to reconcile.

Branching and merging presupposes versioning because forks and merges only make sense when distinct artifact states are identified, retained, and diffable.


Brandolini retains the parent's non-discriminating channel, harmful and corrective flows, per-unit production-cost ratio, bounded defense capacity, saturation threshold, and need to redesign the ratio or channel. It fixes the attack to false or low-quality claims, the defense to fact-checking and contextual reconstruction, and adds an audience-overlap gap.

Brandolini's law is asymmetric attack-defense cost specialized to cheap corruptive claims and evidence-heavy correction on a shared information channel.


Recombining what is already at hand is the defining response to constrained availability; if arbitrary new materials can be obtained, the fixed-inventory structure that distinguishes bricolage disappears.

Bricolage presupposes a fixed, heterogeneous inventory whose insufficiency rules out acquiring purpose-built inputs.


Coercion supplies the genus: Shaping another agent's choice by manipulating the costs and threats attached to their options, so the agent itself 'chooses' the coercer's preferred action — the common parent of forcing an action (compellence) and forcing restraint (deterrence). Brinkmanship preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Deliberately raising a stochastic risk of shared catastrophe, using the rising probability as a bargaining lever. 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.

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


Brinkmanship is 'a specific and unusual case' of commitment_device — the constraint is a probability-ramping process toward a SHARED catastrophe, making a STOCHASTIC catastrophe credible by ceding control (vs a generic device locking in a certain action). Commitment Device supplies the genus: A self-imposed constraint that binds one's own future choices. Brinkmanship preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Deliberately raising a stochastic risk of shared catastrophe, using the rising probability as a bargaining lever. 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.


Broken windows is a positive-feedback signal-inference-response loop with a density threshold (same algebra as an epidemic R0-crossing) — a specialization of feedback restricted to agents inferring a hidden enforcement-cost regime from observable disorder residue. Feedback supplies the genus: Outputs influence inputs. Broken Windows Theory preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Visible unrepaired disorder signals weakened enforcement, lowering the perceived cost of further violation in a self-reinforcing cascade. 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 chemistry_materials frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Decoupling Point: The buffered interface where a flow splits from forecast-driven push upstream into order-driven pull downstream, and whose position sets the lead-time, inventory, and customisation trade-offs. Buffering adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: A maintained intermediate capacity that absorbs excess and releases it during shortfall, smoothing variation and decoupling a source from a consumer whose rates do not match. 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.

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


Buffering presupposes reserve because the capacity it deploys — to absorb perturbation between source and consumer, smoothing variation and decoupling rate mismatches — is precisely a maintained surplus held beyond immediate need. Without reserve's prior structure of deliberately uncommitted capacity available for use when demand spikes or supply dips, buffering would have nothing to draw on. Buffering inherits the reserve framework and supplies a specific deployment pattern: the surplus is positioned between two coupled stages so that excess input fills the reserve and deficit demand drains it, transforming variable flow into steadier output.

Buffering presupposes reserve because the absorbing capacity that buffering uses to smooth variation is precisely a maintained surplus.


A bulkhead divides a shared critical resource into non-overlapping sibling compartments, adding bounded cross-coupling and the differentia that exhaustion or failure in one block must not drain the others.

The bulkhead pattern is partition specialized by sibling isolation and local-failure containment.


Bycatch is what a false-positive RATE becomes when it acts on the world — the real-world non-target capture, with a magnitude-asymmetry and ledger-invisibility dimension the bare error taxonomy lacks. Built on the Type-I/false-positive category; presupposes it. 'Bycatch is the impact-and-visibility structure built on top of the bare error category.'. Type I & Type II Errors supplies the prerequisite condition: False positive/negative. Bycatch operates against that background: A selective process aimed at one target class also captures non-target classes because of the selector's finite specificity, and the harm persists because the success metric counts only the target. 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.


Benign-Sampling Safety Drift supplies the genus: A system near a hazard boundary reads a benign sample of outcomes — uneventful only because the hazard is rare, not because the margin is safe — as proof the safety margin is unnecessary, so each lucky round licenses the next erosion until a low-probability event finds the now-absent buffer. Bypassed Safeguard preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A protective control is systematically routed around by the very operators it was meant to protect, because it imposes friction against a production task and the workaround is locally rewarded and globally invisible until the rare hazard arrives. 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.

Bypassed Safeguard is a specialization of Benign-Sampling Safety Drift, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


A bypassed safeguard presupposes a protective control (a constraint installed to prevent a hazard) that operators route around under production pressure; it is a failure mode OF a constraint, built on the safeguard it disables. Constraint supplies the prerequisite condition: Limits possibilities to guide outcomes. Bypassed Safeguard operates against that background: A protective control is systematically routed around by the very operators it was meant to protect, because it imposes friction against a production task and the workaround is locally rewarded and globally invisible until the rare hazard arrives. 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.


Coordination problems arise when multiple stable equilibria exist and agents must align on one without the decision structure uniquely selecting an answer. The bystander effect is the particular shape this pattern takes in emergency intervention: many co-present potential helpers each face the equilibrium-selection question of who should act, with no built-in mechanism designating one. Diffused responsibility, pluralistic ignorance, and evaluation apprehension prevent any equilibrium from being uniquely selected, often producing the no-one-acts outcome. A structurally-particularized instance of equilibrium-selection failure in a multi-agent helping context.

The bystander effect is the specific shape coordination problems take when multiple potential helpers must align on who acts but lack a focal mechanism.


The bystander effect is the pattern in which each potential intervenor's probability of acting decreases as the number of co-present others rises. Responsibility diffusion — the structural paradox by which spreading obligation across multiple agents reduces each agent's felt personal accountability — is the mechanism producing that decrease. Without responsibility diffusing across the pool, additional bystanders would not weaken any individual's motivation to act. The bystander effect is therefore the emergency-intervention manifestation of the diffusion pattern, presupposing it as the engine of declining per-agent action probability.

The bystander effect presupposes responsibility diffusion because the decline in any individual's likelihood of acting is driven by responsibility spreading across the group.


Caching presupposes locality of reference because the economic case for maintaining a small fast tier alongside a large slow tier depends entirely on workloads in which accesses cluster: recently-used items are likely to be reused soon, and items near a used one are likely to be touched next. Locality supplies the empirical distribution-of-access regularity that makes a cache pay off; without it, every access is equally likely to miss and the cache provides no average-case advantage over going straight to the source.

Caching presupposes locality of reference because exploiting a fast-local copy only pays off when accesses cluster temporally or spatially.


Caching maintains a small, fast tier holding likely-to-be-reused items so that average access latency or bandwidth cost is minimized given finite cache capacity. The eviction policy, sizing, and placement decisions are all instances of choosing values to minimize an expected-cost objective subject to capacity constraints. That is the optimization triplet — variables, objective, constraints — and caching presupposes optimization because every nontrivial cache design is implicitly or explicitly the solution to such a problem.

Caching presupposes Optimization: keeping a fast local copy minimizes expected access cost under locality and capacity constraints.


Caching maintains a fast, local copy of information whose original is slow to fetch, so repeated accesses are served from the copy rather than the source. The cache is meaningful only as a deliberately held surplus — extra storage allocated beyond strict need, valuable precisely because available when demand patterns reuse it. Reserve supplies that structural object: a maintained surplus beyond expected need, absorbing variation without failure. Caching specializes reserve to information access, with locality of reference as the demand pattern the surplus exploits and latency reduction as the value delivered.

Caching presupposes reserve because the fast local copy is a deliberately maintained surplus held against repeated access demand.


Cadence presupposes and builds on periodic recurrence, adding rate-tunability framing on top. Periodicity supplies the prerequisite condition: Regular cycles. Cadence operates against that background: The recurring beat or rate at which repeated operations or periods are spaced — the tempo that sets how often, not the unit it spaces or the bare fact of repeating. 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 overburden remains intact and its load unchanged; failure occurs because a reliance condition is progressively removed until the unsupported structure drops into the void.

Caldera collapse presupposes a load-bearing structure that depends on a support medium whose withdrawal supplies the failure mode.


The child fixes the decaying capability to performance of a mapping and locates the cause in a widening calibration-to-current-world gap. The parent admits that case while also covering intrinsic material, informational, and organizational degradation.

A frozen calibrated rule losing performance as its world drifts is a specific environmental-mismatch mode of temporal decay.


Names calibration as one of the prime's slots — the standing loop that keeps production/combination rules honest against outcomes. A component of a working annotation. After the statistics_experimental_design frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Confidence Annotation: A graded warrant marker attached to a claim that travels with it and tells downstream consumers how much weight to place on it. Calibration adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: Aligning a system's output to a trusted reference by measuring deviation, adjusting to reduce it, and monitoring for drift. 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.


Discrepancy-Driven Correction supplies the genus: Iteratively close the signed gap between a target and an observation. Calibration preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Aligning a system's output to a trusted reference by measuring deviation, adjusting to reduce it, and monitoring for drift. 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.

Calibration is typically a specialization of Discrepancy-Driven Correction, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Calibration secures one of the seven links (unit/traceability). A component of measurement. After the statistics_experimental_design frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Measurement: Mapping a target's attribute onto a scale via an instrument and procedure, yielding a value-plus-uncertainty tied to a unit and frame. Calibration adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: Aligning a system's output to a trusted reference by measuring deviation, adjusting to reduce it, and monitoring for drift. 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.


A callback is 'a narrow, mechanical special case of authority transfer: one action, one condition, no judgment' — registration transfers authority to the holder to act in the registrant's name. A specialization of delegation_of_authority (which grants broad ongoing discretion). Delegation of Authority supplies the genus: Assign responsibility. Callback preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A named action handed off in advance, to be invoked later by someone else when a specified condition arises, releasing the registrant from synchronous waiting. 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.


Canonical form PRESUPPOSES an equivalence relation (the partition) and adds a deterministic reduction to a unique per-class representative plus the biconditional (equivalent iff identical canonical forms). The relation alone does not supply the representative or the cheap-equality economy.


Capability Separation allocates issuance and verification powers across roles and maintains a forgery barrier. Authentication supplies the procedure that binds the artifact's asserted origin to admissible evidence and returns the verdict on which open verification relies. The architecture is not a kind of that procedure; it presupposes the procedure while adding the asymmetric allocation of capabilities and the invariant that verification must not confer issuance.

Capability Separation presupposes an Authentication procedure that checks whether an artifact genuinely originates from the privileged issuer.


The interval must start while continuation remains possible but before additional loading flips from productive to net harmful. Remove that threshold and the entry condition loses its defining criterion, leaving generic inactivity or scheduling rather than a prophylactic capacity-recovery interval.

A Capacity-Recovery Interval presupposes a negative-yield threshold because its timing is defined by beginning before continued loading makes later restoration materially harder or impossible.


Remove the enforced exchange between present output and future restored capacity and there is no reason to enter the interval: the system could continue producing while recovering fully. The bounded low-load state is constituted by accepting a current sacrifice to buy a different future feasible set.

A Capacity-Recovery Interval contains the trade of present output or momentum for greater future capacity and lower collapse risk.


Bijectivity supplies the no-collisions, no-gaps correspondence. Cardinality turns existence of such correspondences into equinumerosity classes, orders them by injections, and develops cardinal arithmetic and transfinite hierarchy.

Equal Cardinality is defined by the existence of a Bijection, allowing finite and infinite collections to be compared without enumerating them.


Bijections make same-cardinality reflexive, symmetric, and transitive, so sets partition into equinumerosity classes. Cardinality adds ordering, arithmetic, finite counting, and the transfinite hierarchy over those classes.

Cardinality contains the equinumerosity Equivalence Relation whose classes are the cardinal numbers.


Set and Membership supplies distinct elements and collections as first-class objects. Cardinality adds equinumerosity, cardinal numbers, comparison by injection, and the finite and transfinite size hierarchy.

Cardinality requires sets as the collections whose size is compared while deliberately ignoring the identity of their elements.


Its three-zone curve is organized around a configuration-set critical load. Threshold supplies that boundary value; carrying capacity adds the load-bearing substrate, degradation beyond the boundary, shrinking future capacity, and recovery hysteresis. This repairs a previously standalone prime without coercing it into a false kind-of relation.

Carrying Capacity contains the sustainable-load Threshold separating normal operation from nonlinear saturation and substrate-eroding overshoot.


Cartesian Product is a derived construction over two or more sets. It requires a value set for each named dimension and membership tests that determine the admissible coordinate values, then forms every ordered tuple across them. The construction is not itself the primitive collection-and-belonging relation, so composition preserves the live entry's explicit boundary.

Every Cartesian Product strictly presupposes input sets, their elements, and membership before it can form all ordered cross-set tuples.


A cascade is the structural pattern in which a state change in one element triggers the same change in coupled neighbors, who then transmit to theirs, producing self-perpetuating chain propagation. The dynamic requires contact-mediated, self-reproducing transmission across a network — exactly what contagion names. Contagion supplies the underlying commitment: a state spreads from affected to connected elements through direct transmission, with each new host capable of infecting its own neighbors. Cascade specializes contagion to threshold-triggered, often-amplifying chain propagation, with disproportion-to-trigger as the characteristic signature.

Cascade presupposes contagion because sequential transmission through coupled elements is the structural mechanism of contagious spread.


A cascade is the propagation of a state change from one element to coupled neighbors, which then trigger theirs, until exhaustion or damping stops the chain. The propagation can occur only over a set of pairwise connections that carries the disturbance — a Network. Without a connection pattern there is no path along which the chain advances, so cascade presupposes network as the structural substrate over which sequential transmission runs and whose topology shapes the cascade's reach and shape.

Cascade presupposes Network: sequential propagation requires a connection pattern through which state changes can travel from element to element.


A cascade specializes propagation by requiring that each newly-affected element not merely register the disturbance but itself become a new source of it, re-emitting the perturbation to its neighbors. Where propagation names the systematic spreading of a signal or effect through a medium or network generally, a cascade fixes the transmission mode as sequential and self-perpetuating: every flipped element adds to the active source population, producing nonlinear total impact disproportionate to the trigger — a particular shape propagation takes when each receiver becomes a transmitter.

A cascade is a specialization of propagation in which each affected element becomes a new source, producing self-perpetuating sequential transmission through coupling.


The cascade is the propagation mechanism INSIDE a burst (one change triggering correlated others); punctuated_equilibrium embeds it within the longer stasis-load-reset cycle. 'the cascade is the burst's internals, not the whole tempo.'. After the systems_cybernetics frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Punctuated Equilibrium: Change runs bimodal in tempo: long intervals of near-stasis that load latent constraint, interrupted by short bursts of correlated structural reorganization. Cascade adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: A change in one element triggers a chain of further changes. 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.


Every Catalysis instance satisfies the Leverage Points signature used by these entries: a comparatively small intervention at a sensitive pathway changes the transformation rate or product distribution disproportionately. Catalysis adds a permitted-but-slow transformation, a barrier-lowering facilitator, pathway selectivity, non-consumption, repeated turnover, and thermodynamic neutrality. Not every leverage point is catalytic, but that is the expected asymmetry between a genus and its strict species, not an exception requiring a typical qualifier.

Catalysis is a strict leverage-point species: a small, reusable facilitator produces disproportionate transformation by lowering one pathway's barrier over many turnovers.


Category supplies objects, typed arrows, closure, identities, and the substance-blind stance. Associativity is the internal axiom equating the two parenthesizations of every three-arrow chain and licensing unambiguous paths.

A Category strictly contains Associativity as the law making every finite chain of arrows independent of how its binary compositions are grouped.


The category adds objects, source and target typing, identity arrows, the associativity law, and the substance-blind modeling posture. Closure remains the internal guarantee that composing two admissible arrows produces another arrow of the same category, so paths can continue without escaping it.

A Category strictly contains closure of its morphisms under the partially defined operation that composes every endpoint-compatible pair.


'the generic prime it specializes' — genus-to-species. category_retrieval_lock_in is lock_in where the costly-to-reverse commitment is a category label compiled into retrieval infrastructure, adding the retrieval-vs-substrate-lock split. Lock-In supplies the genus: Forward-looking cost of switching exceeds the forward-looking cost of staying, even when a superior alternative exists. Category Retrieval Lock In preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A category label that made routine retrieval cheap obstructs novel re-use, because the retrieval infrastructure has compiled the label in place of the property list. 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.

Category Retrieval Lock In is a specialization of Lock-In, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


A specific PATHOLOGY of search_and_retrieval — the compression that makes routine retrieval cheap is what obstructs novel retrieval. It presupposes a retrieval/indexing infrastructure. Search and Retrieval supplies the prerequisite condition: Locate and extract information. Category Retrieval Lock In operates against that background: A category label that made routine retrieval cheap obstructs novel re-use, because the retrieval infrastructure has compiled the label in place of the property list. 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.


It inherits disciplined plural-future inquiry undertaken to change present perception and action. It adds a fixed depth traversal from surface report through systems and worldview to myth, followed by upward reconstruction of alternative futures.

Causal Layered Analysis is foresight specialized to diagnosing and reconstructing possible futures across litany, systemic cause, worldview, and myth/metaphor.


Remove the ordered litany, social-cause, worldview, and myth/metaphor strata and CLA loses both its diagnostic descent and reconstructive ascent. Layering is an internal organization of the method rather than its taxonomic genus.

CLA contains a depth-ordered four-layer explanatory structure with an inverse visibility-leverage gradient and bidirectional traversal.


Causality is a specialization of dependency. The general dependency pattern is the directed asymmetric relation in which one element cannot proceed, function, or be interpreted unless a condition on another is met. Causality specializes by adding two commitments: a productive mechanism linking cause to effect (not merely correlation or precedence) and counterfactual modal robustness (had the cause not occurred, the effect would have differed). The same directed-asymmetric-reliance logic of dependency applies, with productive connection and counterfactual support as the specific gates distinguishing causation from looser dependence.

Causality is a specialization of dependency in which one event productively brings about another with counterfactual modal robustness.


Every Center of Gravity is a high-leverage intervention site by its defining test: disruption of the identified node causes a disproportionate system-wide change rather than an effect proportional to the node's size. It adds an adversarial contest, a cohesion-bearing and substitution-resistant node, paired attacker and defender analysis, and migration of the locus under hardening. Leverage Points also includes non-adversarial rules, goals, and parameters, so the relation is one-way strict specialization.

A center of gravity is the strict adversarial leverage-point species: disrupting its cohesion-bearing, substitution-resistant node disproportionately changes the contest.


The CLT is a specific claim about the limiting SHAPE a SUM-aggregation converges to under finite variance — the Gaussian attractor. Presupposes aggregation (the bare combining operation); other rules (max, product) flow to other attractors.


The token's meaning is backed by the certifier's staked reputation; reputation is a load-bearing component. Reputation supplies the prerequisite condition: An aggregated signal of past behaviour that shapes how others treat an agent. Certification operates against that background: A trusted third party attests, after a defined evaluation, that an entity meets a standard, and issues a portable token downstream parties use as a substitute for re-doing the evaluation. 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.


Certification is an engineered mechanism for manufacturing transferable trust at a distance; it presupposes trust as the disposition it warrants. Trust supplies the prerequisite condition: Willingly accepting vulnerability to another party's future behavior under incomplete monitoring, based on positive expectations about their competence and intentions. Certification operates against that background: A trusted third party attests, after a defined evaluation, that an entity meets a standard, and issues a portable token downstream parties use as a substitute for re-doing the evaluation. 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.


Certification = a verification procedure PACKAGED into a portable, third-party-attested token; it presupposes (is built on) the verification work it wraps. Verification supplies the prerequisite condition: Check that an object conforms to its specification via a defined procedure yielding evidence and a verdict. Certification operates against that background: A trusted third party attests, after a defined evaluation, that an entity meets a standard, and issues a portable token downstream parties use as a substitute for re-doing the evaluation. 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.


Ceteris paribus analysis requires reasoning about how a foreground change would differ while specified background conditions are held fixed. Counterfactual Reasoning supplies the prerequisite condition: Hypothetical alternatives. Ceteris Paribus operates against that background: Analyzing a foreground subsystem while explicitly holding the rest of the system fixed, tracking the gap. 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.


Prediction is the broad genus, change_notification the narrow structured species — a directed-broadcast subset where a party with privileged knowledge of a DECIDED change warns exactly those affected, early enough to act. A specialization adding directed-audience and lead-time and deliberate-change constraints. Foreseeing (Prediction) supplies the genus: Predict future states. Change Notification preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Advance warning, directed at those who depend on a system, that it is about to change in a way they need lead time to prepare for. 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.


Checks and balances gives each holder of power explicit tools — veto, review, audit, override — that restrict the others' admissible actions to those consistent with mutual restraint. The reciprocal tools function as binding restrictions on the feasible set of unilateral moves, ruling out configurations regardless of other merit. That is the defining structure of a Constraint, here woven into a mesh of mutual restrictions. Checks and balances presupposes constraint as the operative mechanism by which power is bound.

Checks and Balances presupposes Constraint: each authority is bound by reciprocal restrictions that exclude unilateral action.


Checks and balances arranges authorities so that one branch's actions feed back to other branches as inputs that constrain their next moves: a veto, audit finding, or override returns to alter what the affected actor does next. That return path is exactly Feedback — output routed back to influence subsequent input — and it is what makes the reciprocal restraint dynamic rather than purely structural. Checks and balances presupposes feedback as the channel through which mutual restraint actually operates.

Checks and Balances presupposes Feedback: each branch's checks become inputs to the others' subsequent decisions and behavior.


Checks and balances equips each holder of distributed authority with explicit tools to constrain the others — veto, review, audit, override — producing reciprocal mutual restraint. This presupposes that authority has already been distributed across separate holders rather than concentrated in one: without the prior division of governmental function into distinct branches or roles, there would be no separate parties between which restraint instruments could be reciprocally exchanged. Separation of powers supplies the distributed-authority substrate that checks and balances operates on as a mesh of mutual constraint.

Checks and balances presupposes separation of powers because the reciprocal-restraint instruments require pre-existing distinct holders of distributed authority.


The heuristic applies because the retained structure's function and the consequences of removal are uncertain. Uncertainty supplies the prerequisite condition: Incomplete knowledge. Chesterton's Fence operates against that background: The persistence of a structure is evidence that it encodes a constraint, so understand its function before removing it. 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.


Chunking is a specialization of compression in which the redundancy being exploited is structural relatedness among items, and the encoding shrinks the count of units working memory must track by binding them into one meaningful chunk. It inherits the general compression commitment that representational length can be reduced when the source contains predictable or relational structure, and specializes by locating the encoding in cognitive working memory: capacity is measured in chunks rather than raw elements, so restructuring raises effective capacity without enlarging the store.

Chunking is a specialization of compression in which a set of items is grouped into a single meaningful unit that working memory then tracks as one element.


Circuit breaker is a specialization of constraint. The general pattern restricts admissible configurations to those satisfying a binding condition, with the feasible set as a first-class object. Circuit breaker instantiates this with the binding condition being a threshold on a monitored flow (current, requests, prices): values exceeding the threshold trigger interruption, removing the protected process from operation until reset. The mechanism converts the threshold into an enforced upper bound on flow magnitude. It is constraint operating dynamically as an automatic interrupter at the edge of admissibility, accepting local stoppage as the price of holding the binding condition.

Circuit breaker is a specific kind of constraint, imposing a binding threshold that interrupts flow once a danger level is exceeded.


A circuit breaker watches a flow for a danger threshold and, when crossed, trips to interrupt the protected process until reset. This presupposes feedback: the structural arrangement in which a portion of a system's output is routed back to influence its subsequent input, closing a loop between cause and effect. The monitor observes the flow's current state and conditions the next-cycle behaviour (continue or interrupt) on what it sees. Without feedback's closed loop returning the flow's state to the trip decision, the breaker has no mechanism to act on the flow it is protecting.

Circuit breaker presupposes feedback because the monitor-trip-reset loop routes the protected flow's state back to control its own continuation.


A circuit breaker presupposes threshold because its operation rests on a monitor watching a flow for a defined danger value and, the moment that value is crossed, actively disconnecting the protected process. Without the prior availability of a threshold as a critical input value separating safe from unsafe regimes, there is no defined moment for the breaker to trip, no sharp transition between continued operation and protective interruption. Threshold supplies the input-response discontinuity that the breaker mechanically enforces.

A circuit breaker presupposes threshold because its trip behavior requires a pre-defined danger value that, once crossed, triggers active disconnection.


It separates removal from upstream input and adds first-, zero-, or mixed-order kinetics, pathway vulnerability, half-life, saturation, and clearance-side intervention. After the systems_cybernetics frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Flow: Structured movement of energy, matter, or information. Clearance Rate adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: The rate at which a bounded system removes substrate is a control surface separable from input, with kinetic regime and vulnerability that input-side reasoning misses. 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.

Clearance Rate is the internally governed outbound-flow specialization that removes a measurable stock from a bounded system per unit time.


The client-server model is 'a directed topology laid over a network' — a network supplies nodes/edges, client-server adds initiation/addressability/multiplexing/capability asymmetries. It presupposes the network substrate. Network supplies the prerequisite condition: Models interactions between components. Client Server Model operates against that background: An asymmetric request-response relation in which one party holds a capability and many others initiate to consume it. 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 method decomposes an artifact into meaningful marks, treats them as evidence, and binds higher-order claims about the artifact to cited grain. Those claims are interpretations: readings recovered from a representational substrate under an evidential and conventional framework. Without an interpretive claim there is nothing for the grain-first discipline to ground. Close reading is nevertheless the method and posture that constrains the act, not the meaning-assignment act itself.

Close reading presupposes an interpretive act whose whole-level meaning claims it constrains, but it is the upstream evidence-grounding method rather than a kind of meaning assignment.


Both assign entities to a finite category structure for downstream reasoning. Clustering adds the differentia that group boundaries and labels are outputs inferred from a chosen feature space and similarity rule rather than inputs supplied in advance.

Clustering is classification specialized to discovering categories from within-group similarity without predefined labels.


Centroid, hierarchical, spectral, density, and graph clustering normally require a pairwise or point-to-representative notion of nearness. The relation is only typical because probabilistic mixture and other generative procedures can assign observations by component likelihood or latent-model fit without defining a reusable similarity between pairs of observations.

Most clustering operationalizes within-group likeness through a similarity, dissimilarity, kernel, or distance-derived measure, while generative mixture methods can group by likelihood or latent fit without an explicit pairwise similarity.


The clustering illusion is the specific FALSE-POSITIVE mode of pattern_recognition against randomness, diagnosable by the missing null model. A specialization of the pattern-detection faculty (its miscalibration, not the faculty).


Co-location typically presupposes a neighborhood when shared presence is defined by a focal region and proximity rule, though exact same-container cases need no tunable radius. In proximity-defined cases, erase the local window or host boundary and shared location becomes undefined. Co-location relates multiple occupants of a region; neighborhood defines the local window itself. Exact same-address, same-container, and same-locus identities can establish co-location without a separately modeled focal neighborhood or radius.


Mere simultaneous existence is not co-presence. At least two bounded systems must be able to register the other's availability and condition possible response on that registration. Agency supplies the responsive entities whose mutual availability constitutes the relation.

Co-presence presupposes agents capable of detecting one another and selecting responses to that mutually available state.


Coarsening is 'one specific dynamical member' of the scale-dependence family — the boundary-cost-driven consolidation of a population toward fewer-and-larger over time, with characteristic kinetics. scaling_and_scale_dependence is the genus. Scaling and Scale Dependence supplies the genus: Patterns and constraints change qualitatively across different scales. Coarsening preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Boundary cost drives a population of units toward fewer and larger, content flowing small to large. 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.


'not generic constraint; the specific geometry of advancing-front and fixed-rear and immobile-subject that produces monotonic compression without exit.' A specialization of constraint with a mobility-asymmetry signature. Constraint supplies the genus: Limits possibilities to guide outcomes. Coastal Squeeze preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: An immobile subject is compressed between an advancing front and a fixed rear, with no exit. 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.


Code-switching is a specialization of contextual mode switching in which the available modes are distinct linguistic codes (languages, dialects, registers, jargons) and the contextual cues that select among them are social, pragmatic, and expressive. It inherits the general contextual-mode-switching commitment that an agent maintains a repertoire of modes optimized for classes of contexts and switches into the situationally appropriate one as a coherent bundle, and specializes by fixing the modes to linguistic codes and obeying the morpho-syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints that govern where and with whom switches occur.

Code-switching is a specialization of contextual mode switching in which the alternation is between distinct linguistic codes triggered by social and pragmatic cues.


Remapping supplies the genus: A single substrate holds multiple disjoint, context-keyed representations and switches discretely between them on a context cue, preserving inactive ones for later re-entry. Code-Switching preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Alternate languages. 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.

Code-Switching is typically a specialization of Remapping, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Coevolution is the structurally-particularized form feedback takes in the evolutionary case: each species' adaptation is the output that returns as the input (the changed selective pressure) on its partner, closing a reciprocal loop between cause and effect across generations. It inherits feedback's structural arrangement in which output routes back to influence subsequent input — particularized to the case where the timescale is generational, the variable is the fitness landscape, and the coupling is mutually reinforcing. Mutual entanglement of trajectories is precisely loop closure.

Coevolution is the specific shape feedback takes when two adapting entities each become persistent selective pressures on each other.


Cognitive Appraisal preserves Evaluation's bounded target, criterion-bearing frame, interpretation of relevant features, and action-guiding judgment. Its differentia are psychological: the target is a perceived situation, the frame is the organism's goals and coping resources, and the result organizes emotion and behavior. Evaluation need not involve an organism, emotion, threat, or coping, so the relation is strict subsumption rather than identity.

Cognitive Appraisal is the organism-centered species of Evaluation whose object is a situation and whose criteria are goal significance and coping capacity.


Cognitive appraisal presupposes a mental model because evaluating a situation's threat-or-benefit relevance and one's coping resources requires an internal representation of the domain — its components, relationships, causal rules, and the agent's place in it — against which the situation is read. Without a mental model's simplified, runnable representation of how the relevant world works, there would be no internal structure for primary and secondary appraisal to consult. Mental models supply the representational substrate; cognitive appraisal supplies the goal-relevant evaluative reading that the model makes possible.

Cognitive appraisal presupposes a mental model because evaluating a situation's significance for one's goals requires an internal representation of the domain to read it against.


Cognitive appraisal is the specific shape sensemaking takes when the agent is an individual organism evaluating a situation's significance for its own well-being. Sensemaking's general anatomy — extracting cues, bracketing them, constructing a plausible identity-grounded account, committing to a frame for action — is structurally particularized into primary appraisal of threat-or-benefit relevance, secondary appraisal of coping resources, and reappraisal as new information arrives. The general operation of producing a working account under ambiguity is preserved; the specific shape is its embodied, emotion-organizing form in an individual facing a goal-relevant event.

Cognitive appraisal is the specific shape sensemaking takes when the system constructing the working account is an individual organism under threat or opportunity.