The Correspondence Principle requires a new, more general theory to reproduce the predictions of the older theory it supersedes in the regime where the older theory was empirically validated, typically as a well-defined limit (h-bar to 0, c to infinity). That is the relational property of Compatibility: two systems coexist without contradiction across the regime where both apply. Correspondence specializes compatibility to successive scientific theories, with the older theory's empirical domain as the alignment region.

Correspondence Principle is a kind of compatibility: a new theory must reproduce the predictions of its predecessor in the latter's validated regime.


The correspondence principle presupposes versioning because it treats theories as named successive states of a body of knowledge -- predecessor and successor -- where the successor must reproduce the predecessor's empirically validated predictions as a limit. Without versioning's explicit identification, retention, and difference-computation between artifact states, there is no formal way to specify which predictions the new theory must recover, in which regime the old theory was valid, or what the reduction (hbar to zero, c to infinity) computes. The principle is a consistency constraint on the version transition. Versioning supplies the prerequisite condition: Tracks incremental changes over time. Correspondence Principle operates against that background: New theories match old limits. 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 correspondence principle presupposes versioning because it constrains how a successor theory must reproduce the predecessor's predictions in their validated regime.


CBA is a decision procedure that presupposes and centrally uses commensurability (common monetary metric) as its core mechanism, not a kind of it. Commensurability supplies the prerequisite condition: Diverse values expressed in common metric enabling comparison. Cost–Benefit Analysis operates against that background: Evaluate decisions. 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.


Cost-benefit analysis aggregates significant consequences of a candidate policy or project into a common monetary metric and uses the net present value as a basis for evaluation. The framework is constituted around the act of choosing — it exists to discriminate between alternatives and recommend one. Decision supplies the act of selecting one alternative from a set, committing future resources, and closing off other paths; CBA is the analytical machinery that informs and structures that selection, presupposing the decisional act as its purpose and addressee.

Cost-benefit analysis presupposes decision because the framework's purpose is to support selecting one alternative over others under constraint.


Cost-benefit analysis is the specific shape value commensuration takes when the common scale is monetary and the aggregation rule is net present value across all significant consequences. Value commensuration's general anatomy — translating heterogeneous values from different frameworks into a single comparable metric, with characteristic loss and contestation — is structurally particularized into willingness-to-pay valuations, monetized externalities, discounted future flows, and a single net-benefit verdict. The general translation-into-common-metric operation is preserved; the specific shape is its monetized, decision-analytic realization for policy and project evaluation.

Cost-benefit analysis is the specific shape value commensuration takes when the common metric is monetized and net present value is the aggregation rule.


The SIGNAL-GENERATION mechanism that weights a nearby counterfactual into a reward/loss signal by distance; it presupposes counterfactual_reasoning to CONSTRUCT the alternative, then folds it in by proximity. 'reasoning constructs the alternative; proximity weighting weights it into a signal'. Counterfactual Reasoning supplies the prerequisite condition: Hypothetical alternatives. Counterfactual Proximity Weighting operates against that background: An internal signal is graded not by the outcome alone but by its distance to a nearby counterfactual outcome of different value, so near misses carry near-reward signals. 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 ESTIMATOR that operationalises a counterfactual into a number: observed minus a constructed baseline standing in for the unobserved counterfactual. 'one operationalisation of the broader concept', sitting 'one level below causality'. Presupposes counterfactuals (the metaphysical target). Counterfactuals supplies the prerequisite condition: Alternate hypothetical scenarios. Counterfactual Subtraction operates against that background: An effect is estimated by subtracting a constructed baseline representing what would have obtained absent the intervention, so the inference rests on the baseline's credibility, not the arithmetic. 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.


Counterfactual reasoning constructs claims of the form had A not occurred, B would not have occurred and uses them to identify causal structure, evaluate decisions, and assign responsibility. That is one of the four essential components of Causality itself: modal robustness — the counterfactual claim that fixing the cause would have fixed the effect under a fixed background. Counterfactuals are the specialization of causality that isolates and operationalizes the modal component as its primary inferential machinery.

Counterfactuals are a kind of causality: causal claims are evaluated by comparing the actual world with what would have happened had a cause differed.


Counterfactual reasoning is a specialization of modal reasoning. Specifically, it deploys a modal operator (the counterfactual conditional) that quantifies over a structured space of alternatives -- nearest possible worlds, intervention regimes, or similarity-ordered scenarios -- to evaluate what would have followed under an antecedent contrary to actual fact. The truth of the counterfactual claim rests on the inner proposition holding across the relevant accessible alternatives, exactly the Kripke-style move modal reasoning names; counterfactuals are the subclass anchored to contrary-to-fact antecedents.

Counterfactual reasoning is a specialization of modal reasoning that evaluates would-have-been claims under contrary-to-fact antecedents.


If the improvement cannot change incentives, exposure, activity, or some other response-bearing variable, no counterresponse can be induced and the fixed-volume gain survives intact. Coupling supplies the dependency; the prime adds intervention, induced adjustment, and offset accounting.

A counterresponse offset requires the intervention's target variable to be coupled to a response channel that feeds back into the realized outcome.


Expected value is an internal constituent of covariance: the means used to center X and Y and the expectation of their centered product are applications of the same probability-weighted linear operator. Remove that operator and the covariance quantity is undefined.

Covariance contains expected-value operations that center each quantity and average their paired deviation products.


Coverage/reachability is explicitly the surjective-direction specialization of the general no-gaps completeness claim. Completeness supplies the genus: No gaps in structure. Coverage / Reachability preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A completeness claim in the surjective direction: every required target in a target set is reachable from at least one of the system's inputs, pathways, or mechanisms. 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.


Surjectivity supplies the genus: A coverage-guaranteeing mapping in which every element of the target is hit by some input, leaving no gap in the codomain. Coverage / Reachability preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A completeness claim in the surjective direction: every required target in a target set is reachable from at least one of the system's inputs, pathways, or mechanisms. 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.

Coverage / Reachability is a specialization of Surjectivity, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Creative destruction operates by reallocating capital, labor, and other productive resources from displaced firms and methods to ascendant ones, which presupposes the underlying machinery of assigning limited supply across competing uses. Without allocation as the structural substrate, there would be no assignment to revise: the displacement of incumbents and the rise of new entrants would have no resource-redistribution dimension. The allocation prime supplies the assignment structure on which the destructive-creative reshuffling acts.

Creative destruction presupposes allocation because its reallocation of resources from less to more productive uses requires an underlying assignment of supply across uses.


Creative destruction is the structurally-particularized form transformation takes in competitive capitalist economies: the input is an existing configuration of products, methods, and firms; the rule is innovation-driven competitive displacement; the output is a restructured economy in which resources have been reallocated from less to more productive uses. The transformation's invariants are aggregate welfare gain and the continuity of market activity; the degrees of freedom being reshaped are the particular firms, technologies, and occupational structures that get displaced.

Creative destruction is the specific shape transformation takes in an economy, where innovation restructures the productive base by displacing the old.


Credible commitment retains the general commitment structure and adds public observability, believable breach cost, and sufficient strength to make compliance execution-time incentive-compatible for a relying actor.

Credible commitment is commitment made believable enough for another actor to rely on through observability and breach cost.


A critical juncture presupposes path dependence because its high-stakes status depends entirely on what happens afterward: the moment is consequential only if subsequent increasing returns, network effects, or institutional inertia make reversal difficult. It inherits path dependence's commitment that current state is irreducible to prior state plus current shock — history is constitutive — particularized to the branching-point case where a brief window of sensitivity precedes long lock-in. Without path dependence's downstream amplification, the juncture would not be critical.

A critical juncture presupposes path dependence because its consequence-amplifying role only obtains when subsequent dynamics lock in the chosen path.


Positions critical_period (the developmental child) and treats critical_juncture as a high-contingency moment; readiness_window is the substrate-general interval whose children include developmental critical periods. Readiness Window supplies the genus: A receptive substrate enters a bounded opening-interior-closing interval during which a class of interventions can take hold. Critical Juncture preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Moment where small variations produce divergent locked-in paths. 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 physics frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Bloom And Bust Cycle: Saturating growth collapses, and the collapse itself becomes a second, often larger, stressor. Critical Mass adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: The minimum quantity needed to sustain a self-perpetuating process. 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.

Critical Mass is the framed or domain-specific realization of Bloom And Bust Cycle; removing the local frame leaves the parent's structural relation intact.


Reaching critical mass = the self-sustaining outcome of the sustainment stage — 'one possible outcome'. After the physics frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Mobilization: Latent capacity is activated, channeled into directed action, and then sustained or returned to rest. Critical Mass adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: The minimum quantity needed to sustain a self-perpetuating process. 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.


Critical mass is a specialization of threshold in which the input variable is the effective reproduction ratio of a propagating process and the response is the qualitative shift from decay to self-sustained activity at R equals one. It inherits the general threshold commitment of a sharp dividing value separating a sub-response regime from a response regime, and specializes by fixing the input to a reproduction count and the output to extinction-versus-runaway. Below the threshold the chain dies; above it, propagation feeds itself.

Critical mass is a specialization of threshold whose specific input is a reproduction-ratio crossing one and whose response is self-sustaining propagation.


Critical mass specializes the tipping-point pattern by fixing the control parameter as quantity, density, or participation level of interacting elements and the threshold as the reproduction-ratio crossing of one. Where tipping points name the general structure of alternative stable states separated by a bifurcation driven by positive feedback, critical mass specifies the bifurcation as the self-sustaining-versus-decaying boundary at R=1 — below it activity decays geometrically, above it activity grows self-sustainingly. The reproduction-ratio framing is the particular shape the bifurcation takes in propagation processes.

Critical mass is a specialization of tipping point in which the control parameter is participation density and the threshold sits at a reproduction ratio of one.


A time-gated window of malleability for acquiring a configuration is a specific developmental/biological instance of the general sensitive-moment-with-locked-in-divergent-paths structure. Critical Juncture supplies the genus: Moment where small variations produce divergent locked-in paths. Critical Period preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A time-gated window of elevated malleability during which a configuration can be acquired, after which the same inputs are far harder or impossible to take on. 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.


Criticality is the state of a system at a phase boundary where response to perturbation becomes unbounded across scales, with diverging correlation length, susceptibility, and power-law event-size distributions. This rests on nonlinearity: the structural failure of superposition in which scaling inputs does not scale outputs proportionally and combined inputs produce new phenomena including thresholds, bistability, and pattern formation. The qualitative regime change at a critical point, where the system transitions between ordered and disordered phases, is impossible in a strictly linear system where any perturbation simply decays additively.

Criticality presupposes nonlinearity because divergent susceptibilities and scale-free fluctuations require failure of superposition.


Cromwell's rule is a specific boundary CONSTRAINT on bayesian_updating: because zero is absorbing for multiplication, contingent priors must stay off 0 and 1 or the update is inert. A corollary of the algebra, a specialization of the general updating mechanism.


Cross-boundary subsidy is a directional resource flow creating donor-coupling reliance, matching dependency's asymmetric-reliance definition. Dependency supplies the genus: Directed relation in which one element relies on another being present, prior, compatible, or supplied, with a specifiable failure mode if the condition is unmet. Cross-Boundary Subsidy preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: An asymmetric, sustained flow of a sustaining resource across a boundary holds a recipient above its endogenous capacity, creating donor-coupling vulnerability mistaken for autonomy. 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 inference from preserved geometry to a relative temporal order and adds the cross-cutting configuration: one trace interrupts, displaces, or overprints another. Geometric chronology is broader because it also includes superposition, inclusion, and other geometry-to-time rules.

Cross-cutting relationship is geometric chronology specialized to the intersection rule that an interrupting or overprinting feature is younger than the feature it cuts.


A specific generative story for WHY an observed cross-output correlation is inflated above the true cross-source signal: a shared channel loads onto multiple outputs (cov(y_i,y_j) = cov(t_i,t_j) + lambda_i*lambda_j*var(c)). A diagnosis built atop correlation, presupposing it.

A specific generative story for WHY an observed cross-output correlation is inflated above the true cross-source signal: a shared channel loads onto multiple outputs (cov(y_i,y_j) = cov(t_i,t_j) and lambda_i*lambda_j*var(c)).


Local-to-Global Aggregation supplies the genus: Locally checkable properties promote to a global verdict under an explicit aggregation discipline. Cross-Impact Analysis preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Interacting trends. 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.

Cross-Impact Analysis is typically a specialization of Local-to-Global Aggregation, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Cross-impact analysis is the specific shape network takes when the entities are future events, trends, or factors within a bounded set and the connections are pairwise influence relations — how the occurrence or strengthening of one factor raises, lowers, or leaves unchanged the probability of another. It is a structurally-particularized instance of studying entities through their connection pattern, with the added commitments that connections are typically encoded in a cross-impact matrix and that the analytical payoff is aggregate trajectory adjustment accounting for all pairwise interactions, surfacing systemic effects single-factor analysis misses.

Cross-impact analysis is the specific shape network takes when nodes are future events or factors and edges are pairwise influence relations.


The operation requires at least two distinguishable levels, a source-level claim, and a target-level claim. Hierarchy supplies that ordered level structure without itself licensing any inference between the levels.

Cross-Level Inference presupposes Hierarchy because a claim can change levels only where distinguishable source and target levels are organized in relation to one another.


Synergy and Antagonism supplies the general deviation from a no-interaction baseline: the joint response cannot be recovered from context-free component effects. Crossover Interaction specializes that family to the qualitative case where the conditional effect crosses zero and reverses direction across levels of the modifying condition.

Crossover Interaction is the sign-reversing species of interaction effect in which one factor's conditional effect is positive at one level of a second factor and negative at another.


Crowding out requires a FINITE shared substrate (bounded capacity) two activities depend on — it presupposes scarcity of that substrate, but is 'sharper than mere competition for scarce resources': the new activity's success must run THROUGH the shared substrate (a nameable channel). Presupposes scarcity; explicitly not a child of competition. Scarcity supplies the prerequisite condition: A finite resource is insufficient to satisfy all competing wants. Crowding Out operates against that background: Introducing or expanding one activity inside a finite shared substrate displaces an existing activity that depended on that same substrate. 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.


Proxy–Target Fidelity supplies the genus: How faithfully an observable proxy tracks the unobservable target it stands in for — the degree to which acting on, optimizing, or inferring from the proxy is acting on the target itself. Cue Outcome Decoupling preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A cue that once reliably tracked an outcome has its coupling broken, while the cue-following behavior persists and grows more harmful the better it tracks the now-decoupled cue. 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.

Cue Outcome Decoupling is a specialization of Proxy–Target Fidelity, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Culmination is the regime PAST where diminishing returns stops applying — diminishing_returns governs the falling-but-positive arm UP TO the peak, culmination is the sign-FLIP beyond it. It presupposes the diminishing-returns curve and names where its marginal crosses zero. Distinct kind (sign-flip vs slope-flatten), adjacent on one curve.


Cultural diffusion is a specialization of contagion: innovations, beliefs, and practices spread from adopter to connected non-adopter through contact, communication, and influence, with each newly adopting agent becoming a fresh transmission source. It inherits contagion's structural commitments — contact-mediated transmission, reproduction in each new host, threshold dynamics governed by transmission rate and network topology — particularized to the cultural-innovation case where what propagates is a practice or idea and the S-curve adoption pattern is the visible signature.

Cultural diffusion is a kind of contagion in which innovations and practices spread through networks of contact and adoption.


Cultural friction presupposes compatibility because the resistance, adaptation demands, and rejection that arise when a practice or artifact is imported are exactly compatibility's failure mode at the level of norms, worldviews, and social structures. Without compatibility's framing of coexistence-and-interaction as a between-entity relational property, friction has no reference: it names the degree to which the imported and host systems fail to align on shared assumptions. Acculturation strategies map onto how the two systems negotiate toward (or away from) compatibility.

Cultural friction presupposes compatibility because the resistance encountered by an imported artifact is the misalignment between its norms and the host culture's.


Cultural hegemony presupposes legitimacy because its distinctive mechanism is the production of consent: dominant groups maintain position not chiefly through coercion but by establishing their worldview as common sense, so the existing order appears natural and rightful. That mechanism only works inside legitimacy's prior structure of voluntary compliance based on recognition of rightness. Hegemony inherits legitimacy's general apparatus of authority-treated-as-rightful and specializes it by identifying the cultural-institutional means — education, media, religion, language — through which that recognition is manufactured, often in ways that disadvantage those who accept the framing.

Cultural hegemony presupposes legitimacy because it works by securing voluntary consent — making dominance appear rightful rather than coerced.


Cultural hegemony presupposes social norms because its mechanism is the conversion of one group's worldview into the shared normative expectations of the broader society — common sense, the taken-for-granted, what everyone knows is appropriate. That conversion requires the prior structure of social norms: distributed expectations sustained by internalization and sanction, applying to everyone similarly situated. Hegemony inherits this norm-architecture and adds the further commitment that the content of the norms tracks the interests of dominant groups, so that compliance with them — felt as ordinary social membership — also reproduces a particular order of inequality.

Cultural hegemony presupposes social norms because it works by installing dominant framings as the taken-for-granted normative expectations of a society.


Curiosity is a specialization of attention. The general pattern is the selective allocation of a limited cognitive resource to a subset of available information, gating what gets processed deeply. Curiosity instantiates this with the allocation criterion being a perceived information gap: the reasoner orients selective attention toward stimuli that promise to close the gap between current and possible knowledge, with the gap-resolution itself intrinsically rewarding. Berlyne and Loewenstein's information-gap framing makes curiosity the attentional bias whose targeting rule is gap salience, particularly within the Goldilocks zone of optimal challenge.

Curiosity is a specific kind of attention, biasing selective allocation toward information that closes a salient knowledge gap.


Curiosity presupposes uncertainty because the information-gap that drives exploration is a specific uncertainty condition: the reasoner perceives an unknown quantity (the missing knowledge), evidence about its possible resolution, and a felt difference between current and possible states of fuller knowing. Without uncertainty's apparatus for distinguishing known from unknown and characterizing the unknown, there is no gap to feel or close. Curiosity is the motivational response to epistemic uncertainty operating in the Goldilocks zone where closure feels both possible and worth the effort.

Curiosity presupposes uncertainty because the perceived knowledge gap that motivates information-seeking is itself an uncertainty state.


The curse arises only as the number of relevant dimensions grows; dimensional structure is constitutive of the pathology. Dimension supplies the prerequisite condition: Degrees of freedom in a system. Curse Of Dimensionality operates against that background: Volume, sparsity, and distance intuitions degrade so fast with added dimensions that low-dimensional methods break down qualitatively, not just quantitatively. 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.


Before the triggering act the outgoing holder bears the defined duty bundle; after it the incoming holder does. The transferred object and duty scope are conserved while the holder-valued state changes discretely, so every genuine Custody Transfer instantiates State and State Transition.

Custody Transfer is a state transition specialized to a holder-indexed responsibility state changed by one release-and-bind triggering act.


A cut is a vertex-bipartition-plus-crossing-edges object DEFINED ON a network/graph; it presupposes a relational network. 'a relational network... the bipartition... the crossing-edge set.'. Network supplies the prerequisite condition: Models interactions between components. Cut operates against that background: A partition of a network's vertices and the crossing edges, converting global connectivity into a local edge-set. 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.


Network supplies the prerequisite condition: Models interactions between components. Cycle operates against that background: A closed path in a network that returns to its origin, opening return, foreclosing ordering, and creating a loop invariant. 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.

Cycle presupposes Network, whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


Every Damping process irreversibly transfers organized energy out of the tracked dynamical variables into heat, radiation, frictional modes, or another sink. That is Dissipation. Damping adds a moving, displaced, or fluctuating degree of freedom, a damping coefficient, and underdamped, critical, or overdamped response regimes that describe how the excitation decays.

Damping is Dissipation specialized to removing energy from an excited dynamical degree of freedom and reducing its response.


Exception: critically damped and overdamped responses return without oscillating, and damping may reduce aperiodic fluctuations rather than a recurrent trajectory.

The canonical damping problem begins with an oscillatory mode whose amplitude envelope shrinks as energy is removed, making Oscillation the usual dynamical substrate. It is not universal: at or above critical damping the actual response returns monotonically, and some damping acts on broadband or aperiodic fluctuations. Oscillation is therefore a typical prerequisite rather than an identity requirement.

Damping commonly acts on Oscillation, but non-oscillatory return and aperiodic fluctuation are valid damping regimes.


A failure mode at the contracted meeting point where content arriving through an interface is re-interpreted from data into control; presupposes an interface (the stage on which the breach occurs). Interface supplies the prerequisite condition: A bounded, rule-governed surface across which two systems exchange information or control while hiding their internals, letting each evolve independently behind a stable contract. Data-Control Plane Breach operates against that background: Untrusted content crosses into the data channel un-inertised and an interpreter, operating correctly by its own rules, executes it as control, wielding the defender's authority for the attacker. 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.


Untrusted Input Execution supplies the genus: Attacker-influenced input crosses a data-to-control (or authority) boundary and a correctly-operating intermediary executes it with the intermediary's own authority, so the attacker borrows the defender's privilege without ever violating the intermediary's rules. Data-Control Plane Breach preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Untrusted content crosses into the data channel un-inertised and an interpreter, operating correctly by its own rules, executes it as control, wielding the defender's authority for the attacker. 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.

Data-Control Plane Breach is a specialization of Untrusted Input Execution, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Data_drift is the complementary CHANNEL where P(x) moves (the input distribution shifts). One channel of the same gap. Calibrated Rule versus Moving World supplies the genus: A rule, model, or policy fitted to a past distribution of the world degrades as the world it was calibrated on drifts away from that distribution. Data Drift preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A static learned mapping silently loses accuracy as the deployment distribution drifts away from the distribution it was calibrated on. 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.


Temporal Decay and Degradation supplies the prerequisite condition: System properties or capabilities systematically diminish over time. Data Drift operates against that background: A static learned mapping silently loses accuracy as the deployment distribution drifts away from the distribution it was calibrated on. 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.

Data Drift typically presupposes Temporal Decay and Degradation, whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


Training-serving skew is the general mismatch between preparation and deployment environments. Data drift adds a fixed learned mapping, a reference distribution, and temporal covariate, concept, or label movement that opens the mismatch after deployment.

Data drift is training-serving skew caused by temporal movement in the deployment distribution relative to the learned reference environment.


Data integrity presupposes invariance because the integrity guarantee names a feature -- the data's intended content and internal rules -- that must remain unchanged under the family of transformations data undergoes (writes, reads, transmission, archival, processing). Checksums, signatures, and constraints are the mechanisms that verify invariance under each operation. Without invariance's joint commitment to preserved feature and preserving operations, there is no formal sense in which data is or is not corrupt; integrity is engineered invariance with detection and recovery. Invariance supplies the prerequisite condition: Properties unchanged under transformation. Data Integrity operates against that background: Accuracy and consistency preserved. 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.

Data integrity presupposes invariance because preserving accuracy across the data lifecycle is the preservation of intended content under storage, transmission, and processing operations.


Data integrity is preserved by mechanisms — checksums, error-correcting codes, digital signatures, validation rules, audit, provenance — that check stored or transmitted data against the criteria it must satisfy and produce a verdict of accept or repair. That is the defining structure of Verification: a procedure that checks conformance to specification and yields evidence-backed verdicts. Data integrity specializes verification to the case where the specified object is data and the specification covers accuracy, consistency, and authorized state.

Data Integrity is a kind of verification: checksums, signatures, and audits confirm conformance to the data's intended specification.


Time leakage is the model-evaluation species in which future or held-out information enters fitting, feature construction, calibration, or validation. Information outside the artifact's declared as-of boundary enters its construction and makes the reported historical or prospective evaluation invalid. The artifact is a statistical or computational model pipeline and the output is contaminated performance, calibration, or deployment evidence. Applies to temporal, look-ahead, and future-derived leakage. Train-test contamination among contemporaneous records can be Data Leakage without a later-to-earlier information channel.


The failure is defined by an invalid performance claim: a model, forecast, examination, audit, or blinded assessment is scored as though its decision were made without information that crossed into fitting or calibration. Validation supplies the held-apart reference and the claim of out-of-sample competence; without that separation, the same information flow is ordinary input rather than leakage.

Data leakage presupposes a validation boundary separating information legitimately available at decision time from information reserved for calibration or evaluation.


A data_structure is the arrangement-for-use trade — privileging some operations cheap at the structural cost of penalizing others (the no-neutral-arrangement invariant). It presupposes a trade_offs frame; the operation-profile is the trade made concrete. Trade-offs supplies the prerequisite condition: Balancing competing priorities. Data Structure operates against that background: An arrangement of information that makes some operations cheap at the structural cost of others. If the parent condition is removed, the child relation becomes undefined or loses the mechanism asserted by this edge; the parent can obtain independently, so the relation is presupposition rather than subsumption. 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.


Deadlock's essential commitment is a circular waiting dependency, which is precisely a closed loop returning to origin in the dependency graph, the structure cycle names. Cycle supplies the genus: A closed path in a network that returns to its origin, opening return, foreclosing ordering, and creating a loop invariant. Deadlock preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Mutual blocking processes. 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.


Deadweight loss is the inefficiency particularization of allocation: it names the structural shortfall between the realized assignment of resources and the welfare benchmark of competitive equilibrium. Where allocation names the bare assignment of limited supply to competing claims generally, deadweight loss specifies the case where the assignment forecloses mutually beneficial trades, producing a loss in which no party captures the foregone surplus — a particular form of misallocation distinguished from transfers, which merely shift surplus between parties.

Deadweight loss is the specific shape allocation takes when distortions prevent mutually beneficial transactions, leaving surplus uncaptured by any party.


Deadweight loss is the reduction in total surplus relative to a benchmark welfare allocation that distortions prevent the market from reaching. The benchmark is the competitive-equilibrium allocation with no market failures — precisely the Pareto-efficient frontier where no change can make anyone better off without making someone worse off. Pareto efficiency supplies exactly that benchmark: the set of allocations from which no Pareto improvement is available. Deadweight loss is meaningful only against this benchmark, presupposing Pareto efficiency as the reference point from which welfare losses are measured.

Deadweight loss presupposes Pareto efficiency because the welfare benchmark from which the loss is measured is the no-Pareto-improvement-available allocation.


Deadweight loss is the reduction in total surplus that results when a market distortion prevents mutually beneficial transactions, measured as the welfare triangle. The size of that triangle is determined by how responsive quantity is to price — the more elastic supply and demand, the larger the deadweight loss for a given tax or price wedge. Price elasticity supplies the responsiveness parameter that calibrates the magnitude. Deadweight loss as a quantified welfare claim typically presupposes elasticity, though qualitative existence-of-distortion arguments can be made without it, hence typical.

Deadweight loss typically presupposes price elasticity because the magnitude of welfare lost from a price distortion depends on demand and supply responsiveness.


Blowback is a self-referential return path: a signal the deceiver authored re-enters the deceiver's own decision loop through a shared channel — a specialized self-reference pathology where the system poisons itself. is-a a reflexivity/self-reference failure.


Presupposes an injected (misleading) signal into a shared channel; built on a signaling act whose return is the defect. Signaling supplies the prerequisite condition: Revealing hidden information. Deception Blowback operates against that background: A misleading signal injected into a shared channel to deceive an adversary returns through an unintended path to confuse the deceiver's own decision loop, allies, downstream systems, or future selves, at a cost the original calculation never scored. 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.


'Logical decidability is one instance of the computability partition' — decidability concerns a formal system's mechanical settleability; computability is the broader medium-neutral boundary. computability is the genus. decidability_computability is the survivor. Computability supplies the genus: The in-principle boundary between problems an effective procedure can solve and those none can. Decidability Computability preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A class of yes/no questions admits a finite procedure that always terminates with the correct answer. 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.


Decision is the act of selecting one alternative from a set under conditions of constraint, uncertainty, or trade-off. The set itself is constituted by constraint — a condition that restricts admissible configurations to those satisfying it, producing the feasible set from which selection draws. Without constraint there is no bounded choice set, no closure of options, and no meaningful selection. Constraint supplies the binding restriction that defines what counts as an admissible alternative; decision then ranges over that set and commits to one element, so it presupposes constraint as the substrate of its choice space.

Decision presupposes constraint because selecting one alternative from a set requires that the admissible set be defined by binding restrictions.


A decision is the moment when deliberation collapses into commitment, and the structure of that commitment is defined by where it sits on the reversibility dimension: whether the chosen path can be unwound, at what cost, and within what window. Without the prior distinction between reversible and irreversible action, a decision would have no commitment dimension — no closing-off of alternatives, no resource locking, no preserved or sacrificed flexibility. The reversibility property is what gives decisions their consequential weight.

A decision presupposes reversibility and irreversibility because every selection carries an implicit commitment to a position on the reversal-cost dimension.


Each gate is a `decision` (resolve advance/terminate/revert); the prime is the structured sequence of gate decisions. a decision is the 'building block' of which stage-gate is a sequence. After the cognitive_science frame is stripped away, the retained structural roles are those of Stage Gate Process: Partition a long commitment into evidence-gated stages with escalating commitment and a funnel of kills. Decision adds the local frame and commitments expressed in its identity: Committing to one alternative from a set under uncertainty and trade-off, collapsing open deliberation into a chosen path and foreclosing the others. The parent pattern remains recognizable without that vocabulary, while the child is the framed realization of it. That preservation test establishes decomposition rather than taxonomic subsumption.


'the broad prime under which this one is a sharp special case' — the specific competitive failure where the binding mechanism is TEMPO (one decision cycle forced to react to another's). Competition supplies the genus: Rivalrous pursuit of a scarce prize where one party's gain is another's loss. Decision Cycle Subordination preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A slower actor's decision cycle becomes forced to respond to a faster actor's tempo, and responding faster deepens the subordination rather than escaping it. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


A relational PATHOLOGY between two actors' decision cycles — it presupposes decision-making and adds the cross-actor tempo dynamic decision alone does not contain. Decision supplies the prerequisite condition: Committing to one alternative from a set under uncertainty and trade-off, collapsing open deliberation into a chosen path and foreclosing the others. Decision Cycle Subordination operates against that background: A slower actor's decision cycle becomes forced to respond to a faster actor's tempo, and responding faster deepens the subordination rather than escaping it. 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.


Decision fatigue produces a systematic — not random — shift in choice patterns as a sequence progresses: later choices reliably tilt toward defaults, status-quo options, and impulsive selections. The displacement is in a consistent direction and persists across the sequence rather than averaging out across additional acts. That is the defining structure of Bias: a persistent offset of process output from the unbiased target. Decision fatigue specializes bias to sequential decision-making under deliberative-resource depletion.

Decision Fatigue is a kind of bias: depletion produces a systematic, direction-consistent drift toward defaults and impulsive choices.


Decision fatigue is a specialization of cognitive resource depletion in which the consumed capacity is specifically that for effortful deliberative choice. It inherits the general depletion pattern of time-dependent performance decay under sustained use, reversible by rest, and distinguishes itself by tying the consumption to extended sequences of decisions and by registering its signature in choice-quality markers: more defaults, more impulsivity, more status-quo bias, more errors late in the sequence than early. The substrate is the same depleting resource; the specialization fixes its expenditure to decision-making.

Decision fatigue is a specialization of cognitive resource depletion in which the depleting capacity is sustained deliberative choice.


Decision fatigue is the empirical claim that the quality of choices in a sequence declines as the sequence continues, with later acts showing more default-reliance, impulsivity, and error. The phenomenon is defined over a sequence of Decision events: there must be repeated acts of selecting one alternative from a set before any degradation pattern can be observed or named. Decision fatigue therefore presupposes Decision as the unit it counts and the act whose quality degrades.

Decision Fatigue presupposes Decision: the phenomenon is a degradation pattern across a sequence of choice acts.


Deep time presupposes time because its content is a re-framing of the temporal dimension at scales vastly beyond biographical or historical horizons — geological, evolutionary, cosmological. It inherits time's structural commitment to ordered succession with measurable duration and irreversible direction, particularized to the very-long-timescale regime where processes invisible on human timescales become dominant and human intuition systematically underestimates duration. Deep time is time read at log-scale.

Deep time presupposes time because its content is the cognitive frame adopted for timescales of millions to billions of years.


The familiar object's repeated inconsequential presentation has already reduced deliberate attention even though the perceiver remains capable of responding. Without that habituated automatism there is nothing for estrangement to break and no recovery of attention that distinguishes the technique from merely presenting something novel.

Defamiliarization presupposes a habituated, stimulus-specific loss of orienting response that an estranging re-presentation can interrupt.


Defeat in detail is a specific mechanism within competition — a globally weaker party beats a globally stronger but DISTRIBUTED one via local superiority and sequential engagement (concentration latency as the binding variable). One way to win a competition, not competition itself. it is 'one way to win a competition, not competition itself.'. Competition supplies the genus: Rivalrous pursuit of a scarce prize where one party's gain is another's loss. Defeat In Detail preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A globally weaker attacker beats a globally stronger but distributed adversary by achieving local superiority and engaging the parts sequentially before they can combine. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association. The typical qualifier limits the claim to the characteristic route, not a constitutive requirement of every instance; exceptions must retain the child's identity through another mechanism.


A deviation that remains causally inert or wholly local does not satisfy the prime's disproportionate-consequence identity. Propagation supplies the source, medium, pathway, speed, attenuation, and reach structure; Defect adds regularity, localization, stress concentration, bulk-versus-defect diagnosis, and engineering leverage.

Defect requires a localized deviation's consequence to spread through the regular structure's coupling channels and alter a macroscopic property.


Defense in depth specializes redundancy: it layers barriers FOR failure ABSORPTION UNDER ATTACK, with INDEPENDENCE OF failure MODES load-bearing and an optimizing adversary seeking the correlated breach. Plain redundancy duplicates for reliability against RANDOM failure. 'defense in depth specifically denotes layering for failure absorption under attack' — the adversarial specialization of stacked-multiples. Redundancy supplies the genus: Duplicate critical components. Defense In Depth preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Stacking multiple independent protective layers between threat and asset so that only a correlated breach across all layers produces total loss. 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.


Degrees of freedom counts the independent parameters needed to specify a system's state after constraints are imposed — formally, unconstrained parameters minus constraints. The count is meaningful only against a specified set of binding restrictions that prune the feasible set: holonomic constraints in mechanics, statistical constraints after estimation, kinematic constraints in mechanism design. Without constraints as a first-class structural object defining the admissible subset, the dimensionality reduction that degrees of freedom measures would have nothing to subtract from and no operational content.

Degrees of freedom presupposes constraint because counting independent parameters only becomes meaningful once binding restrictions on configurations are specified.


Degrees of freedom quantifies the number of independent parameters required to specify a system's complete state, computed as unconstrained parameters minus constraints. This presupposes decomposition: breaking a whole into constituent parts whose independent analysis and recombination reconstitute it. The state is decomposed into a set of independent coordinates (mechanical generalized coordinates, statistical sample components, mechanism joints), each contributing one dimension to state space; constraints reduce the effective count. Without decomposition's structure-preserving partition into independent pieces, there is no notion of independent parameters to count.

Degrees of freedom presupposes decomposition because the count of independent parameters is read off the system's decomposition into independent coordinates after constraints.


Dimension counts independent coordinates needed to specify a configuration. Degrees of Freedom inherits that invariant and fixes how it is obtained: start from candidate parameters and subtract binding constraints, yielding the effective dimension of admissible variation.

Degrees of freedom is effective dimension specialized to the count of independent parameters remaining after constraints are imposed.


Pragmatics supplies the genus: What a signal means in context is the joint product of its literal content and patterned contextual machinery, not just what the signal literally encodes. Deixis preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Context-dependent meaning. 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.

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


Delegation is the structured transfer of a right to decide from a principal to an agent within specified limits, with the principal retaining ultimate responsibility. The transfer can only occur if such a right exists in the first place — a recognized, legitimate power to make binding decisions. Authority supplies precisely that: the socially recognized capacity to create obligations, vested in a role rather than in raw capability. Without an underlying authority to allocate, there is nothing for delegation to assign or for accountability mechanisms to track back to.

Delegation of authority presupposes authority because there must be a legitimate decision-making power before any of it can be transferred to subordinates.


The Delphi Method is the particularization of aggregation to the setting of distributed expert opinion: many individual judgments are collapsed into a unified summary that retains the consensus signal while suppressing personal-influence and dominance distortions. Where aggregation names the deliberate loss of granular detail to retain chosen features generally, Delphi specifies that the feature retained is the convergent expert estimate while the detail suppressed is identity-linked bias, anchoring, and groupthink artifacts that contaminate unstructured pooling.

The Delphi Method is the specific shape aggregation takes when distributed expert judgment is collapsed into a consensus through structured, anonymized iterative rounds.


The Delphi Method repeatedly elicits expert judgments, summarizes responses and rationales, returns controlled anonymous feedback, and uses that output as input to the next round until a stopping criterion is met. Removing the expert-panel, anonymity, judgment-elicitation, and foresight frame leaves Iteration's portable structure: repeated steps, carried state, output-to-input updating, progress assessment, and a termination rule.

The Delphi Method is Iteration specialized to anonymous expert elicitation, with each round's feedback becoming input to the next.


Demand is 'desire made cost-responsive and quantified into a curve' — preference is the unconditioned ranking (the input), demand is the schedule preference generates against a budget. It presupposes preference. Preference supplies the prerequisite condition: Agent's ordering over a choice set on some evaluative dimension. Demand operates against that background: A schedule relating quantity sought to generalized cost, with slope, elasticity, and substitution structure. 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.


Trade-offs supplies the prerequisite condition: Balancing competing priorities. Denormalization operates against that background: Deliberately re-introduce controlled redundancy against a canonical form, trading a synchronization burden for access-side wins. 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.

Denormalization presupposes Trade-offs, whose structure must already obtain for the child mechanism to be meaningful or operational.


Density is a relation OF a subset IN a host under a closeness notion (closure-equals-host); it is a specialized property within the set-and-membership apparatus — a set whose closure fills another. Set and Membership supplies the genus: Groups and categorizes elements. Dense Set preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A smaller set reaches arbitrarily close to every point of a larger one. 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.


How a system's dependency WEIGHT is distributed across providers; it presupposes a dependency structure and characterizes the shape of that reliance (a graph-weight property). Dependency supplies the prerequisite condition: Directed relation in which one element relies on another being present, prior, compatible, or supplied, with a specifiable failure mode if the condition is unmet. Dependency Distribution Concentration operates against that background: How a system's dependency weight is distributed across providers — concentrated or spread — is a structural property that bounds its fragility independent of its own defenses. 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.


Propagation supplies the genus: The systematic spreading of a signal, effect, or state from a source through a medium or network, where the medium's structure governs how fast it moves, how it attenuates, and which paths it follows. Derivative Amplification preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: In a serial chain where each upstream stage responds to the rate of change of its downstream neighbour, variation amplifies geometrically with chain length. 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.

Derivative Amplification is a specialization of Propagation, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Design for implementation is the systematic practice of treating manufacturing capabilities, supply-chain limits, assembly sequences, and operational costs as binding restrictions on the admissible set of design configurations. Without constraint's machinery of treating a binding restriction as a first-class structural object, there would be no way to convert downstream realization limits into upstream design rejection rules: a configuration violating production feasibility would be no different from a configuration meeting it. The parent prime supplies the binding-restriction structure that this discipline applies to implementation context.

Design for implementation presupposes constraint because the discipline is precisely the inclusion of production and operational limits as binding restrictions on design choices.


Design for implementation systematically constrains design decisions to fit the realities of production, assembly, operation, and end-of-life processes — meaning the design cannot pursue ideal functional performance alone. The discipline operates by accepting compromise on one valued dimension (e.g., maximum performance, minimum part count, ideal geometry) to improve another (manufacturability, maintainability, supply-chain robustness). This is exactly the trade-off structure: improving one dimension within a feasible set requires worsening another. Without recognition that valued dimensions are multidimensionally coupled, the entire discipline collapses into single-objective optimization.

Design for implementation presupposes trade-offs because constraining design to producibility necessarily worsens some functional dimensions to improve others.


Design for lifecycle adaptability is the engineered, anticipatory particularization of adaptation: rather than a system changing in response to sustained environmental change after the fact, the designer pre-embeds modular interfaces, redundancy, excess capacity, and reconfiguration paths so that future modification is supported. Where adaptation names the modification of a system to fit new conditions generally, the design-for-adaptability variant fixes the timing — the adaptive capacity is engineered in upfront, before the conditions that will exercise it are known.

Design for lifecycle adaptability is the specific shape adaptation takes when adaptability mechanisms are deliberately built into a system at design time.


Design for lifecycle adaptability deliberately structures systems so they can be modified, upgraded, or repurposed across operational life without excessive cost. The practical mechanism is typically modular structure: changes are absorbed by replacing or reconfiguring discrete modules without rippling through the whole. Modularity supplies the decomposition into independently revisable components with stable interfaces. Lifecycle adaptability rides on this organization to keep modification cost bounded, though some adaptability strategies use redundancy or parameterization without strict modularity, so the dependence is typical rather than strict.

Design for lifecycle adaptability typically presupposes modularity because the future changes it accommodates are absorbed at module boundaries.


Abstraction is the purpose-relative retention of structure that keeps what is load-bearing for a use across many concrete instances. Design patterns is the particular shape this move takes in design and architecture: recurring problem-solution shapes are extracted from many concrete instances, named, and codified so the abstracted structure can be reused in new situations. It is a structurally-particularized instance of abstraction whose specific projection retains the generalizable problem-solution structure and discards the particulars of any one application.

Design patterns is the specific shape abstraction takes when recurring solution structures are named and extracted for reuse across instances.


Approximation is the deliberate substitution of a tractable surrogate for an intractable target, with a controlled and named error the use case can tolerate. Design prototyping is the particular shape this move takes in engineering and design: the eventual full product is the intractable target, the prototype is the simpler tangible surrogate, and the bounded fidelity gap is what the learning purpose can absorb. It is a structurally-particularized instance of substitution-under-controlled-error whose specific machinery is materialized partial embodiment for the sake of feasibility and form learning.

Design prototyping is the specific shape approximation takes when a tractable physical or interactive surrogate stands in for the eventual full product.


Design prototyping creates partial, testable versions of a design to learn about feasibility, form, and function before full commitment. The prototype's value is realized through iteration: each round produces evidence that feeds the next design cycle, with state carried between rounds and progress measured across them. Iteration supplies the repeated-application-with-state-carryover structure that prototyping rides on. Some single-shot prototypes serve as one-time confidence checks without iterative cycles, so the dependence is typical, though the canonical use case is iterative refinement.

Design prototyping typically presupposes iteration because the prototype's purpose is to feed learning into successive rounds of design refinement.


The deliberate ASYMMETRIC editing of an affordance set so the misuse path is costly while the legitimate path stays free; affordance is the raw material, this is the design move performed ON affordances. 'affordance is the material; this is the design move'. Affordance supplies the prerequisite condition: An action possibility offered by the fit between an agent and its environment. Designed-Out Misuse operates against that background: Affordances and defaults are arranged so the misuse path is costly or impossible while the legitimate path stays easy, preventing harm before enforcement has to act. 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.


Desire paths add a prescribed route, an inscribing substrate, repeated traversal, and a redesign response to the portable revealed-preference inversion from behavior to what users value or need.

Removing the route-design frame leaves inference of latent preference from a durable trace of costly observed choices rather than stated reports.


Determinism presupposes causality because its content — that state plus laws fix exactly one successor — operates on the cause-effect relation: laws are the productive connection from prior state (cause) to next state (effect), and modal robustness is the counterfactual invariance of the law itself. It inherits causality's four-part structure and particularizes it to the case where the law is single-valued rather than probabilistic. Without causality's productive connection, the deterministic trajectory has nothing to specify.

Determinism presupposes causality because its claim is precisely that the present state plus laws fix a unique successor via the productive cause-effect connection.


Deterrence is coercion in the RESTRAINT-FORCING direction (costs conditional on a proscribed act). Explicit genus-to-species. 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). Deterrence preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Preventing an action not by blocking it but by arranging consequences so the target's own cost-benefit calculation makes the action unattractive. 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.


Develops_from is a relation but a highly-specified one — one continuant through directed, qualitatively-distinct, rule-governed stages — adding the four commitments (continuant identity, directed ordering, qualitative change, generative rule) the bare relation lacks. A typed directed identity-preserving edge as against an unlabeled link. Relation supplies the genus: Describes associations or dependencies. Develops-From Relation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A later entity came to be by stage-wise transformation of a continuing predecessor, the same continuant passing through directed, qualitatively distinct stages under a generative rule. The parent can occur without those added commitments, whereas removing the parent structure leaves no basis for classifying the child as this subtype. That asymmetry establishes subsumption rather than mere association.


A diagnostically inert signal is signaling specialized to a message that detects an event while omitting actionable diagnostic content. Signaling supplies the genus: Revealing hidden information. Diagnostically Inert Signal preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A signal that announces a failure but carries none of the content needed to act on it, splitting detection-completeness from recovery-completeness. 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.


Self-reference is the PRECONDITION; the diagonal flip is what extracts the impossibility. It presupposes a self-modeling system that can name its own analyzers, then engineers a flip object. Reflexivity (Self-Reference) supplies the prerequisite condition: Self-referential systems. Diagonal Impossibility operates against that background: In a self-modeling system, a putative total analyzer is refuted by constructing an object engineered to make the analyzer's verdict on it contradict the property it decides. 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.


Dialectic presupposes inquiry-based learning because the multi-interlocutor exchange depends on the stance that understanding arises by formulating questions, testing claims against evidence and counter-position, and revising in light of what the exchange surfaces. Without inquiry's commitment to investigation-driven knowing -- problematic situation, evidence-gathering, explanation-construction, revision -- the elenchus collapses to mere debate. Dialectic specializes the inquiry stance by routing the investigation through structured dialogue between competing positions rather than a solo investigator's confrontation with a phenomenon.

Dialectic presupposes inquiry-based learning because its elenchic question-answer-clarification cycle is the inquiry stance applied through structured dialogue.


Dialectic uses structured question-answer-clarification across multiple positions to expose assumptions, pressure claims, and converge on understandings unreachable from a single vantage point. The end product is a constrained reading of the matter under examination, answerable to the exchange's evidence and the framework that scopes available answers. That is the activity of Interpretation — recovering meaning from a representational substrate under a framework that makes some readings available and others not. Dialectic specializes interpretation to multi-voice procedural inquiry.

Dialectic is a kind of interpretation: structured exchange between positions recovers meaning that no single vantage can reach.


Differential_decay is the child that enriches generic decay: two COUPLED signals fade at DIFFERENT rates, so the survivor carries a meaning the pair never asserted (often a sign flip) — a CONTENT transformation, where signal_decay_and_fadeout is a MAGNITUDE reduction. generic decay reduces magnitude, differential decay reshapes content. Signal Decay and Fadeout supplies the genus: Signals, influence, or effects systematically weaken over time or space. Differential Decay preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Two coupled signals decay at different rates, so the surviving component carries forward a meaning the original pair never intended — often with a sign flip. 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.


Differentiated instruction is the structurally-particularized form adaptation takes in the pedagogical case: the system (the classroom and teacher's practice) modifies internal structure (content, process, product, environment) in response to sustained variation in learner readiness, interests, and profiles, preserving effective instruction across the distribution. It inherits adaptation's commitment to internal modification that improves fit to changed conditions, particularized to the case where the changing conditions are within-classroom learner diversity rather than external environment.

Differentiated instruction is the specific shape adaptation takes when teaching tailors content, process, and product to learner variation.


Differentiated instruction is a specialization of pedagogy whose distinctive move is calibrating the instructional encounter to the readiness, interests, and learning profiles of individual learners rather than delivering a uniform program. It inherits pedagogy's general commitment that an instructional agent deliberately structures another agent's engagement with content to cause durable capability change, and adds the operating principle that the structuring must vary across learners within a shared class because uniform delivery predictably underserves both ends of the readiness distribution and fails to leverage classroom diversity.

Differentiated instruction is a specific pedagogy that tailors content, process, product, and environment to individual learner profiles within one classroom.


Diffusion is a specialization of flow in which the transport mechanism is the aggregate of microscopic random walks rather than coherent bulk motion, and the driving gradient is in concentration of the transported quantity itself. It inherits the general flow commitment of directional transfer of a conserved quantity from source to sink along a gradient, and specializes by fixing the mechanism to stochastic redistribution that yields Fick's-law proportionality between flux and gradient, with no central agent directing the movement.

Diffusion is a specialization of flow in which net transport arises from microscopic stochastic motion down a concentration gradient.


Diffusion presupposes gradient because its constitutive law, Fick's, ties flux to the negative of the concentration gradient: there is no net diffusion in the absence of a gradient, and the gradient supplies both direction (down-slope) and magnitude (proportional to steepness) of macroscopic transport. Gradient supplies the general apparatus of pointwise direction-of-steepest-change in a scalar field; diffusion translates that local field-structure into a quantitative rule for net transport via the diffusion coefficient. Without a gradient, microscopic random motion produces no macroscopic flux.

Diffusion presupposes gradient because the net flux it describes is driven by, and proportional to, the gradient of the diffusing quantity.


Diffusion specializes propagation by fixing the transmission mechanism as the aggregate stochastic or gradient-driven movement of many microscopic constituents, with no central directing agent. Where propagation names the systematic spreading of a signal or effect through a medium or network generally, diffusion specifies that the spread arises from microscopic randomness producing macroscopic flux down concentration gradients, governed quantitatively by Fick's law — a particular shape propagation takes when the medium is a stochastic substrate and the influence moves via collective random-walk dynamics.

Diffusion is a specialization of propagation in which the spreading mechanism is the aggregate of random or gradient-driven movements of microscopic constituents.


Dimensional analysis requires every physical equation to be dimensionally homogeneous: every additive term and both sides of any equality must share identical dimensional signatures. This presupposes constraint: a condition restricting admissible configurations to those satisfying it, with the feasible set as a first-class object. Dimensional homogeneity is a binding restriction on the space of candidate equations: any expression violating it is not admissible regardless of other merit. The Buckingham pi theorem then quantifies how this binding constraint reduces the number of free parameters, exactly the constraint-reduces-feasible-set move.

Dimensional analysis presupposes constraint because dimensional homogeneity is a binding restriction on which equations among physical quantities can be admissible.


Dimensional analysis presupposes invariance because dimensional homogeneity -- the requirement that both sides of a physical equation share the same dimensional signature -- is exactly the claim that the equation's truth is preserved under the named family of unit-system transformations. The Buckingham pi theorem then exploits this invariance: the dimensionless groups are the invariants of the unit-change group, and the count (n minus k) is the dimension of the invariant subspace. Without invariance's joint specification of preserved feature and preserving operations, dimensional reasoning has no formal warrant.

Dimensional analysis presupposes invariance because dimensional homogeneity requires that physical laws hold unchanged under unit-system changes.


Dimensionality reduction maps high-dimensional data into a lower-dimensional representation chosen to preserve the structural features that matter for downstream tasks — variance, neighborhoods, predictive information — while discarding redundant or noisy dimensions. The low-dimensional representation is a tractable surrogate for the intractable original, with an explicit error measure tied to the downstream criterion. That is the defining shape of Approximation, here specialized to data representation where the surrogate is a lower-dimensional projection or embedding.

Dimensionality Reduction is a kind of approximation: a low-dimensional surrogate stands in for high-dimensional data with controlled loss.


Dimensionality reduction is a specialization of compression in which the redundancy being exploited is dimensional: high-dimensional data lies on or near a low-dimensional manifold, and a transformation projects it onto that lower-dimensional representation while preserving variance, distances, or predictive information. It inherits the general compression commitment that redundant structure can be eliminated without losing what matters and that the choice between lossless and lossy reduction is governed by which features must be preserved. The specialization fixes the redundancy to dimensional correlations rather than symbol-level statistics.

Dimensionality reduction is a specialization of compression in which redundancy in a high-dimensional representation is removed by projecting onto a lower-dimensional latent structure.


Diminishing incremental gains presupposes nonlinearity because its structural claim, that each successive unit of input produces less output than the one before, is precisely a statement of concavity: a nonlinear input-output relation in which scaling does not preserve proportionality. Nonlinearity supplies the general space of relationships in which superposition fails and qualitative features like thresholds and saturation become possible; diminishing gains picks out the concave-saturating subfamily of that space as a domain-general heuristic across learning, utility, exercise, and effort.

Diminishing incremental gains presupposes nonlinearity because concave saturation of returns is one of nonlinearity's signature shapes.


Diminishing incremental gains says successive units of an input produce smaller increments of output once a threshold is passed, so the marginal cost of each next unit of benefit rises along the concave curve. Continuing to improve on the output dimension therefore requires giving up more on the input side — time, money, effort — than for any prior unit. That is the structure of a Trade-off, here driven by concavity in the input-output relationship rather than fixed-frontier opposition between two outputs.

Diminishing Incremental Gains is a kind of trade-off: each new unit of input buys less output, raising the relative cost of further improvement.


The law of diminishing returns is a specialization of diminishing incremental gains restricted to the technological setting of a production process with at least one fixed factor, where the marginal product of a variable input eventually declines. It inherits the general concave input-output pattern that each successive unit yields a smaller increment, and specializes by fixing the domain to production economics, the cause to the fixed-factor constraint, and the variables to marginal, average, and total products. The broader heuristic of diminishing gains covers learning curves, utility, and effort; the law isolates the production-function instance with formal microeconomic predictions.

The law of diminishing returns is a specialization of diminishing incremental gains restricted to production with at least one fixed input.


Diminishing returns is the structurally-particularized instance of nonlinearity in a production-economic setting: a production function with at least one fixed factor exhibits an eventually-negative second derivative in the variable input, so marginal product declines past a threshold. It carries forward nonlinearity's general commitment that scaling does not preserve proportionality and that concavity and saturation are structural features, and gives this shape the specific economic content of an empirically robust law about marginal, average, and total product under input fixity.

Diminishing returns is the specific shape nonlinearity takes when a production function with a fixed factor exhibits eventually-negative second derivative in the variable input.


A DAG is a specific KIND of network/graph — directed edges plus a global no-return (acyclicity) constraint. A specialization of the general network with the added direction + acyclicity invariants.


Discounting is a technique that achieves commensurability across time by converting future values to present value; a mechanism, not a genus-instance. Commensurability supplies the prerequisite condition: Diverse values expressed in common metric enabling comparison. Discounting (Present Value) operates against that background: Present value calculation. 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.


Discounting is the structurally-particularized instance of time preference in finance and economic analysis: the psychological weighting of present over future is turned into an explicit discount rate r and a formula C divided by one plus r to the t (or continuous exponential) that converts a future cash flow into its present-value equivalent. It carries forward time preference's general commitment that delayed outcomes count for less than immediate ones, and gives this idea its specific quantitative shape in NPV, IRR, and discounted-cash-flow analysis.

Discounting is the specific shape time preference takes when its psychological weighting is operationalized as a discount-rate formula converting future cash flows to present value.


Discounting is the operational particularization of time value of money: it provides the formula and procedure (C/(1+r)^t or C·exp(-rt)) for converting future cash flows into present-equivalent amounts using a discount rate that encodes time preference, opportunity cost, and risk adjustment. Where time value of money names the foundational principle that a unit of currency today is worth more than the same unit later, discounting fixes the quantitative apparatus — the rate, the compounding scheme, the present-value computation — that operationalizes the principle for decision analysis.

Discounting is the specific shape time value of money takes as the quantitative technique for converting future cash flows into present-value equivalents.


'feedback's goal-directed specialisation — feedback structured around an explicit target and a signed gap that the action is keyed to.' A strict subspecies of feedback (which has no target). Feedback supplies the genus: Outputs influence inputs. Discrepancy-Driven Correction preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Iteratively close the signed gap between a target and an observation. 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 current identity includes a direct discrete-versus-continuous contrast and engineered quantization from continuous signals. Continuity is therefore part of the live bundle. This edge records the source as it exists while a separate identity audit decides whether the bundle should be narrowed and renamed Quantization rather than pretending the already-canonical poles are absent.

Continuity is the other constitutive pole of the bundled comparison and supplies the continuum against which imposed quantization is defined.


The current node explicitly compares countable separated values with a continuum and then analyzes mechanisms that produce quantized levels. Discreteness is therefore an internal constituent, not merely a neighboring concept: removing separated states removes both one side of the comparison and the defining output of quantization.

Discreteness is one constitutive pole of the bundled discrete-versus-continuous comparison and supplies quantization's separated admissible states.


Discreteness is a specialization of boundary. The general pattern marks a demarcation between an entity and what is outside, with the demarcation criterion governing membership and the permeability governing crossings. Discreteness instantiates this with the demarcation isolating each element from its neighbours, formally captured by the discrete topology in which every singleton is open and every point is isolated. The boundary between any element and any other is impermeable: there are no intermediate values. It is boundary maximized to the per-element scale, enabling counting, enumeration, and the combinatorial toolbox.

Discreteness is a specific kind of boundary where the demarcation produces isolated points with no intermediate values between them.


Discreteness presupposes set and membership because its defining property, separated identifiable states with positive minimum spacing or isolated points, makes sense only against the prior availability of a collection of distinct elements that membership picks out. Set supplies the general apparatus of collection-as-first-class-object with a well-defined inclusion criterion; discreteness then characterizes the substructure of the set as one in which elements are individuated without intermediate values. Without set and membership, there is no enumerable collection on which discreteness's combinatorial reasoning, counting, and finite-state machinery can operate.

Discreteness presupposes set and membership because identifying separated states requires the prior availability of distinct elements satisfying a membership criterion.


Discretion presupposes authority because the rule system's deliberate leaving-open of a gap and assignment of the choice within it to a situated agent requires that the agent hold legitimate power to make binding decisions in that space. Without authority's recognized right to bind, the discretionary choice is mere opinion that others may ignore. Discretion is authority operating in the rule's silences: the rule fixes the boundary, and the authority delegated to the agent fills the interior with case-specific judgment that binds through the agent's recognized standing.

Discretion presupposes authority because the designed delegation of judgment within a rule's gap requires legitimately empowered decision-making in that space.


Diseconomies of scale is the extension of diminishing marginal contribution into per-unit-cost reversal past a threshold scale. Diminishing Incremental Gains supplies the genus: Reduced benefit per unit. Diseconomies of Scale preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Rising per-unit cost once scale grows past a point. 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.


Scale names the general fact that system properties and governing laws vary as size or aggregation level changes, so that the system at one scale may be qualitatively different from the system at another. Diseconomies of scale is the particular shape this pattern takes in cost-output relations: beyond some band, coordination overhead and internal friction rise faster than added output, turning the size-efficiency curve unfavorable. It is a structurally-particularized instance of the band-specific-ontology pattern where the band-crossing is felt as an upturn in average cost.

Diseconomies of scale is the specific shape scale takes when growth past some size makes per-unit performance worse rather than better.


Disjointness is empty intersection under a fixed identity criterion — a relation among collections within the set-and-membership apparatus. A specialized set-relation. Set and Membership supplies the genus: Groups and categorizes elements. Disjointness preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Two or more populated collections share no element. 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.


Propagation supplies the genus: The systematic spreading of a signal, effect, or state from a source through a medium or network, where the medium's structure governs how fast it moves, how it attenuates, and which paths it follows. Dislocation Motion preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Large-scale change of an ordered medium achieved by propagating a localised defect rather than rearranging every unit at once. 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.

Dislocation Motion is typically a specialization of Propagation, retaining the parent's defining structure while adding the child's specific commitments.


Dispersion is the property-indexed differentiation of rates within a propagating bundle — a specialization of propagation ('not propagation as such'). Propagation supplies the genus: The systematic spreading of a signal, effect, or state from a source through a medium or network, where the medium's structure governs how fast it moves, how it attenuates, and which paths it follows. Dispersion preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: A co-launched bundle separates because propagation rate depends on a per-component property. 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.


Disruptive innovation is the specific trajectory-crossing case within the broad Schumpeterian creative_destruction — an INITIALLY INFERIOR entrant on a cheaper steeper curve crossing the incumbent's value curve. creative_destruction also includes SUSTAINING displacements that are not disruptive. The inversion test (was the entrant initially worse on the headline metric?) distinguishes them. 'creative destruction is the broader category and disruptive innovation a specific mechanism within it.'. Creative Destruction supplies the genus: Replacement through innovation. Disruptive Innovation preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: An initially inferior entrant on a cheaper, steeper trajectory crosses the incumbent's value curve and displaces it, because the terms of competition shift rather than the entrant winning on the old ones. 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.


Dissipation is the systematic conversion of organized energy or structural order into thermalized, un-recoverable form through interactions with many degrees of freedom. This rests on irreversibility: the structural preclusion of restoring a process's prior state without a costly compensating change in the environment. Dissipation cannot be a coherent pattern unless the conversion has a privileged direction; the entropy-increase clause that makes friction, viscosity, and Joule heating dissipative is exactly the thermodynamic structural feature irreversibility specifies as its mechanism.

Dissipation presupposes irreversibility because the unrecoverable conversion of order into heat is the defining one-way process irreversibility names.


A systematic, rule-governed, non-random deviation of output from faithful input is precisely bias's systematic-directional-error signature applied to signal transformation. Bias supplies the genus: Systematic, directional error distinct from random noise. Distortion preserves that general structure while adding its differentia: Systematic, mapping-induced deviation of an output from a faithful rendering of its input. 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.


Distortion is a transformation's DEVIATION from a reference faithful one; it presupposes a transformation. Transformation supplies the prerequisite condition: A rule-governed mapping that restructures an input into a different output, holding certain invariants fixed while altering others. Distortion operates against that background: Systematic, mapping-induced deviation of an output from a faithful rendering of its input. 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.