Individuation & Identity Criteria

Primes about the rules that fix what counts as a single, identifiable entity, including criteria of individuation, identity and unity tests, aspectual individuals derived from a role, identifiability of hidden unknowns, and equity's context-sensitive standard.

7 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Aspectual Individual — Treating a single underlying entity, under a fixed role or aspect, as a distinct derived bearer of properties with its own narrower existence conditions.
• Criteria of Individuation — The rules a system fixes for what makes something one entity — when parts compose a single whole, when two presentations are the same entity, and which kind supplies a thing's persistence — together constituting its inventory of countable individuals.
• Equity — Context-sensitive fairness.
• Identifiability — Whether an internal unknown can in principle be uniquely recovered from the observable signal a system makes available.
• Identity Test — The rule that decides, in a given system, when two presentations refer to the same entity.
• Uniformitarianism — Same processes over time.
• Unity Test — The rule that decides, in a given system, when a collection of parts counts as one whole rather than many.