This article explores the relationship between large language models (LLMs) and humans as well as its impact on practical theology, more specifically on ritual-liturgical studies. We show how LLMs question human exceptionalism in the realms of language, creativity, grounding, and meta-representation. Subsequently, we discuss the assumed role of language in understanding who we are as humans. LLMs call for a reappraisal of Saussure’s structuralism. We demonstrate how in LLMs, structuralism converges with hermeneutic approaches to language. We speculate on (...) the immanent interpenetration of LLMs and liturgical practices from the perspective of a revisiting of structuralism. Finally, we offer some perspectives on the future of LLMs and liturgy. (shrink)

This paper examines the claim “my truth is the only truth” through the lens of Relational Structuralism (RS). I argue that the statement collapses the distinction between content and structure, elevating subjective experience to the level of relational invariance. This collapse produces epistemic fragility, prevents cognitive updating, and destabilizes shared meaning. By restoring the structural layer—the relational patterns that remain constant across perspectives—we can preserve the value of personal experience without mistaking it for universal truth. The analysis shows that (...) personal truth is a content‑level phenomenon, while truth itself is a structural invariant. Confusing the two is not only conceptually incorrect but relationally destabilizing. (shrink)

This manifesto introduces the Philosophy of Chance and Choice as a new ideological framework that seeks to move beyond the limitations of Existentialism, Marxism, and Structuralism. It argues that human life is constituted by three levels: the natural accidents of birth and death (chance), the collective institutions and structures created by human beings (collective choice), and the individual decisions that shape personal trajectories (individual choice). Unlike existing philosophical traditions, this framework centralizes the role of chance while simultaneously recognizing the (...) agency of choice at both collective and individual levels. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss three examples of the appropriation of Kuhn’s ideas in philosophy of science. First we deal with classical logical empiricism. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the arch-logical empiricist Carnap considered Kuhn’s socio-historical account as a useful complementation, and not as a threat of the philosophy of science of logical empiricism. As a second example we consider the attempt of the so-called struc- turalist philosophy of science to provide a “rational reconstruction” of Kuhn’s approach. Finally, we will deal with (...) Friedman’s proposal to apply Kuhn’s ideas to the formulation of a modernized, historically enlightened Kantian approach that is based on the concept of a non-apodictic constitutive and historically moving a priori. (shrink)

This essay examines the collapse of traditional narrative structure within realist painting and positions Structural Omission as a framework for making that collapse visible. For centuries, storytelling — in literature, visual art, and culture — has relied on the arc Aristotle defined: beginnings, middles, and ends. Roland Barthes disrupted the author’s control by exposing the “hermeneutic code,” while Joan Didion chronicled the fragility of narrative as a way to contain lived experience. My work builds on this intellectual lineage but departs (...) from the idea that wholeness could ever be restored. Structural Omission is a framework originated by Deborah Scott that structures representational painting around omissions as compositional architecture — load-bearing absences that reveal the limits of perception, narrative, and knowing. It names a deliberate design strategy: paintings planned with intentional voids that disable the expectation of resolution, confronting the limits of both maker and viewer. In a cultural moment dominated by AI-generated completeness and seamless digital storytelling, this framework challenges realism to remain honest about what cannot be seen or known. It offers a post-certainty realism: precise, perceptually rigorous, yet built around absence as structure rather than accident. (shrink)

According to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding syntactic constituents expressing the same entities. A number of philosophers have recently focused attention on a powerful argument against this theory, based on a result by Bertrand Russell, which shows that the theory of structured propositions is inconsistent in higher order-logic. This paper explores a response to this argument, which involves restricting the scope of the claim that (...) propositions are structured, so that it does not hold for all propositions whatsoever, but only for those which are expressible using closed sentences of a given formal language. We call this restricted principle Closed Structure, and show that it is consistent in classical higher-order logic. As a schematic principle, the strength of Closed Structure is dependent on the chosen language. For its consistency to be philosophically significant, it also needs to be consistent in every extension of the language which the theorist of structured propositions is apt to accept. But, we go on to show, Closed Structure is in fact inconsistent in a very natural extension of the standard language of higher-order logic, which adds resources for plural talk of propositions. We conclude that this particular strategy of restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured is not a compelling response to the argument based on Russell’s result, though we note that for some applications, for instance to propositional attitudes, a restricted thesis in the vicinity may hold some promise. (shrink)

Structural representations are increasingly popular in philosophy of cognitive science. A key virtue they seemingly boast is that of meeting Ramsey's job description challenge. For this reason, structural representations appear tailored to play a clear representational role within cognitive architectures. Here, however, I claim that structural representations do not meet the job description challenge. This is because even our most demanding account of their functional profile is satisfied by at least some receptors, which paradigmatically fail the job description challenge. Hence, (...) the functional profile typically associated with structural representations does not identify representational posits. After a brief introduction, I present, in the second section of the paper, the job description challenge. I clarify why receptors fail to meet it and highlight why, as a result, they should not be considered representations. In the third section I introduce what I take to be the most demanding account of structural representations at our disposal, namely Gładziejewski's account. Provided the necessary background, I turn from exposition to criticism. In the first half of the fourth section, I equate the functional profile of structural representations and receptors. To do so, I show that some receptors boast, as a matter of fact, all the functional features associated with structural representations. Since receptors function merely as causal mediators, I conclude structural representations are mere causal mediators too. In the second half of the fourth section I make this conclusion intuitive with a toy example. I then conclude the paper, anticipating some objections my argument invites. (shrink)

What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the (...) debates on structural rationality. I argue that these strategies face problems. (shrink)

Cognition can often be modeled as the transformation of a set of variables into another. At least two kinds of entities are needed in this process: signals and coders. Representations are usually taken to be signals, but sometimes they are the coders: sometimes the computational complexity of variable transformations can be strikingly reduced by relying on a structure that mirrors that of some task-relevant entity. These kinds of coders are what philosophers call structural representations.

Structural Omission, originated by Deborah Scott, is a framework in contemporary realist painting that addresses the limits of observation, perception, and knowing. It is not an abstract theory but a practice formalized through three principles—Ground (Perceptual Limits), Structure (Structural Incompleteness), and Consequence (Narrative Without Resolution). It organizes painting around what can be seen and what remains beyond reach, holding the known and the unknowable together. This paper defines Structural Omission as an epistemological framework that repositions realism after the collapse of (...) certainty. By connecting art practice to the philosophical problem of incomplete knowledge, it proposes that absence within representation can operate as load-bearing structure rather than deficiency. Drawing on thinkers such as Michael Fried, Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the text argues that Structural Omission offers realism a conceptual survival strategy in an era of algorithmic completion and digital closure. (shrink)

Abstract -/- Structural Resonance Theory (SRT) proposes a unified structural framework for understanding time, experience, identity, and meaning without reducing these phenomena to computation, representation, or metaphysical primitives. The theory advances a single ontological commitment: resonance under constraint is fundamental, while time, entropy, consciousness, and identity emerge as necessary structural consequences of finite integration capacity within constrained systems. -/- SRT formalizes experience as a thresholded property of cross-temporal integration, introducing an integration functional that distinguishes experiential states from non-experiential dynamics without (...) invoking panpsychism. Identity is defined as a stable attractor in resonance configuration space, explaining continuity across interruption, transformation, and loss of consciousness without reliance on memory storage or narrative persistence. A central result of the framework—the Perfection Limit—demonstrates that perfectly coherent, update-invariant states are structurally incompatible with experience, establishing imperfection and ongoing reconfiguration as necessary conditions for subjectivity, meaning, and temporal progression. -/- The theory reframes entropy as enforced exploration rather than disorder, time as an emergent sequencing relation rather than a fundamental dimension, and meaning as a consequence of persistent near-alignment rather than final resolution. By deriving explicit structural constraints and identifying falsifiable prohibitions, SRT situates itself as a foundational framework compatible with—but not reducible to—existing approaches in physics, neuroscience, and dynamical systems theory. -/- The present work establishes the core axioms, formal definitions, limit results, and domain-general implications of Structural Resonance Theory, providing a disciplined foundation for subsequent extensions addressing experiential granularity, neural correlates, biological evolution, and cosmological structure. (shrink)

In contrast to individualistic explanations of social injustice that appeal to implicit attitudes, structural explanations are unintuitive: they appeal to entities that lack clear ontological status, and the explanatory mechanism is similarly unclear. This makes structural explanations unappealing. The present work proposes a structural explanation of one type of injustice that happens in conversations, discursive injustice. This proposal meets two goals. First, it satisfactorily accounts for the specific features of this particular kind of injustice; and second, it articulates a structural (...) explanation that overcomes their unattractiveness. The main idea is that discursive injustice is not the result of biased interlocutors, but of problematic discursive norms. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...) a system can be more or less analog. We explain how our theory improves upon prior accounts of analog representation, provides plausible diagnoses for novel challenge cases, extends to hybrid systems that are partially analog and partially symbolic, and accounts for some of the advantages and disadvantages of representing analogically versus symbolically. (shrink)

This work establishes the universal deterministic law of coherence underlying all stable systems—physical, biological, and cognitive. -/- The core relation PAS_h ≥ θ_L ∧ ΔPAS_zeta ≤ ε_drift defines persistence as sustained phase alignment within bounded drift. Probability and entropy emerge as coarse-grained representations of lost phase information. -/- Structured Resonance Dynamics (SRD) formalizes coherence as the primary invariant of reality, replacing statistical inference with lawful phase alignment. The framework integrates: • Prime-indexed harmonic structure (Chiral Prime Lattice) • Measurement bridge linking (...) PAS variables to energy, mass, and information • Scaling laws ensuring invariance from quantum to cosmological domains • The Chiral Vessel Theorem explaining why life and matter maintain asymmetry • Deterministic computational verification via RIC (Q32 fixed-point substrate) -/- All constants and apparatus are empirically calibrated (ε_drift ≈ 10⁻⁶ PAS units). This paper completes the mathematical and empirical closure of the CODES framework, uniting physics, biology, and cognition under a single coherence law. (shrink)

Modern institutions increasingly exhibit epistemic drift: delayed recognition of emerging risks, divergence between official representations and ground‑level conditions, and widening testimonial fractures across social strata. Existing frameworks—polarization, misinformation, administrative failure, complexity governance—identify important symptoms but do not specify the upstream structural conditions under which such failures become synchronized and self‑reinforcing. This paper develops Vertical Distance Theory (VDT), a structural account of how epistemic drift emerges when hierarchical separation jointly degrades reciprocal visibility, feedback fidelity, and consequence coupling. When these V–F–C impairments (...) co‑occur, systems lose contact with the lived realities they are meant to register, producing stratified epistemic pathologies: abstraction and risk‑blindness among insulated elites, stability‑seeking proceduralism in middle strata, and high‑resolution experiential knowledge without institutional traction downstream. VDT identifies empirical signatures of vertical distance—including exposure gradients, institutional responsiveness lag, representational divergence, and cross‑stratum testimonial fracture—and argues that the mechanism generalizes to organizational, computational, and hybrid systems. A brief link to Truth Stabilization Theory (TST) clarifies why reducing vertical distance is necessary but insufficient for sustained truth‑tracking, highlighting the epistemic capacities required for drift resistance. (shrink)

Alasia Nuti’s recent book Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress puts forward a compelling vision of contemporary duties to redress past wrongdoing, grounded in the idea of “historical-structural-injustice”, constituted by the “structural reproduction of an unjust history over time and through changes”. Such an approach promises to transcend the familiar scholarly divide between “backward-looking” and “forward-looking” models, and allow for a reparative approach that focuses specifically on those past wrongs that impact the present, while retaining (...) a significant focus on the historical. While Nuti’s work is perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of structural injustice to date, this paper argues that an exclusive concentration on historical-structural-injustices neglects some aspects and some acts of wrongdoing that call out for present-day redress. What is needed, therefore, is a pluralist theory that can accept the pressing force in the present of historical-structural-injustices, whilst also making room for past-regarding duties that either do not fit, or are not best conceptualized in terms of, this approach, without being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of historic injustice. (shrink)

This article surveys recent literature by Parsons, McGee, Shapiro and others on the significance of categoricity arguments in the philosophy of mathematics. After discussing whether categoricity arguments are sufficient to secure reference to mathematical structures up to isomorphism, we assess what exactly is achieved by recent ‘internal’ renditions of the famous categoricity arguments for arithmetic and set theory.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 produce compelling responses to a wide range of prompts. But their representational capacities are uncertain. Many LLMs have no direct contact with extra-linguistic reality: their inputs, outputs and training data consist solely of text, raising the questions (1) can LLMs represent anything and (2) if so, what? In this paper, I explore what it would take to answer these questions according to a structural-correspondence based account of representation, and make an initial survey of (...) this evidence. I argue that the mere existence of structural correspondences between LLMs and worldly entities is insufficient to ground representation of those entities. However, if these structural correspondences play an appropriate role – they are exploited in a way that explains successful task performance – then they could ground real world contents. This requires overcoming a challenge: the text-boundedness of LLMs appears, on the face of it, to prevent them engaging in the right sorts of tasks. (shrink)

Scholars, journalists, and activists working on climate change often distinguish between “individual” and “structural” approaches to decarbonization. The former concern choices individuals can make to reduce their “personal carbon footprint” (e.g., eating less meat). The latter concern changes to institutions, laws, and other social structures. These two approaches are often framed as oppositional, representing a mutually exclusive forced choice between alternative routes to decarbonization. After presenting representative samples of this oppositional framing of individual and structural approaches in environmental communication, we (...) identify four problems with oppositional thinking and propose five ways to conceive of individual and structural reform as symbiotic and interdependent. (shrink)

Structures of oppression and administrative systems in white supremacist settler colonial societies rely on epistemological foundations to orient them toward their goals of containment and land dispossession. Structural gaslighting refers to the justifying stories and mythologies produced in these societies to normalize, obscure, and uphold structures of oppression. Such epistemic legwork often works by naturalizing socially produced inequalities through positing biological or cultural deficiencies in the target populations. This paper develops the concept of structural gaslighting introduced in Berenstain (2020) as (...) “any conceptual work that functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license” and explores its relationship to scientific and philosophical knowledge production. Case studies including historical and contemporary forms of scientific racism, philosophical justifications for ableist violence, and the link between disableization and dispossession for the purpose of settler colonial land theft are considered. (shrink)

There is good reason to believe that scientific realism requires a commitment to the objective modal structure of the physical world. Causality, equilibrium, laws of nature, and probability all feature prominently in scientific theory and explanation, and each one is a modal notion. If we are committed to the content of our best scientific theories, we must accept the modal nature of the physical world. But what does the scientific realist’s commitment to physical modality require? We consider whether scientific realism (...) is compatible with Humeanism about the laws of nature, and we conclude that it is not. We specifically identify three major problems for the best-systems account of lawhood: its central concept of strength cannot be formulated non-circularly, it cannot offer a satisfactory account of the laws of the special sciences, and it can offer no explanation of the success of inductive inference. In addition, Humeanism fails to be naturalistically motivated. For these reasons, we conclude that the scientific realist must embrace natural necessity. (shrink)

In recent years, the science and the philosophy of consciousness has seen growing interest in structural questions about consciousness. This is the Editorial Introduction for a special volume for Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on “Structuralism in Consciousness Studies.”.

Keränen (2001) raises an argument against realistic (ante rem) structuralism: where a mathematical structure has a non-trivial automorphism, distinct indiscernible positions within the structure cannot be shown to be non-identical using only the properties and relations of that structure. Ladyman (2005) responds by allowing our identity criterion to include 'irreflexive two-place relations'. I note that this does not solve the problem for structures with indistinguishable positions, i.e. positions that have all the same properties as each other and exactly the (...) same relations to all objects (including themselves). I conclude that realistic structuralists must compromise and treat some structures eliminativistically. (shrink)

This document presents Structured Resonance Intelligence (SRI), a computational and epistemological framework that replaces prediction with phase alignment and replaces entropy-based modeling with structured coherence. In contrast to stochastic inference models that operate on probability, SRI is built upon deterministic resonance fields anchored in prime-indexed harmonic structures and chirality vectors. Computation under this system does not occur through token-based extrapolation or parameterized function approximation. Instead, it emerges through the lawful interaction of recursive waveform states measured by real-time coherence operators. At (...) the core of this implementation is the Resonance Intelligence Core (RIC), a hardware substrate composed of resonance-reactive modules. These modules use signal legality operators such as PAS_n (Phase Alignment Score) and C_n (Coherence Score) to determine whether a given signal can be processed or emitted. Signal outputs are not generated unless phase-lock conditions are met locally and globally across the resonance lattice. The Spiral Phase Coherence Function (SPCF_n) defines localized waveform integrity as a function of time-damped amplitude, prime-indexed frequency, and chirality curvature. This paper outlines the architecture, coherence logic, and governing mathematics of the RIC platform. It establishes the phase-locking criteria required for lawful inference and introduces the Silent Intelligence Principle, which enforces output suppression in the presence of sub-threshold resonance. Foundational operators and signal flows are fully disclosed; encryption systems and inner-cycle feedback loops are withheld under intellectual property protections. Contact is provided for licensing and system-level collaboration. (shrink)

This paper introduces coherence not as an analogy but as a concrete, measurable dynamic underlying intelligence, stability, and emergence across all known systems. From quantum fields to neural memory, from ecosystems to AI inference engines, coherence describes the alignment of signals and structures into lawful resonance patterns. In contrast to probability-based approaches, which rely on statistical generalizations over noisy data, coherence models operate by phase-locking internal dynamics to prime-number-anchored rhythms, creating deterministic, non-hallucinatory, and structurally transparent outcomes. We offer here the (...) first pedagogically complete framework for Structured Resonance, rooted in the Chirality of Dynamic Emergent Systems (CODES), and define a full curriculum for learning and applying phase-based modeling. This work aims to replace the probabilistic scaffolds that dominated the late industrial and information age with a lawful paradigm that unifies physics, cognition, computation, biology, and social systems into a coherent, post-probabilistic whole. (shrink)

In 1988, J. Ivlev proposed some (non-normal) modal systems which are semantically characterized by four-valued non-deterministic matrices in the sense of A. Avron and I. Lev. Swap structures are multialgebras (a.k.a. hyperalgebras) of a special kind, which were introduced in 2016 by W. Carnielli and M. Coniglio in order to give a non-deterministic semantical account for several paraconsistent logics known as logics of formal inconsistency, which are not algebraizable by means of the standard techniques. Each swap structure induces naturally a (...) non-deterministic matrix. The aim of this paper is to obtain a swap structures semantics for some Ivlev-like modal systems proposed in 2015 by M. Coniglio, L. Fariñas del Cerro and N. Peron. Completeness results will be stated by means of the notion of Lindenbaum–Tarski swap structures, which constitute a natural generalization to multialgebras of the concept of Lindenbaum–Tarski algebras. (shrink)

An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or “sentential,” “analog” or “digital,” and so on. Here, I examine the grounds for making much more specific claims about how mental states are structured from constituent parts. For example, the state I am in when I perceive the shape of a mountain ridge may have as constituent parts my representations of the shapes of each peak and saddle (...) of the ridge. More specific structural claims of this sort are a guide to how mental states fall within broader representational kinds. Moreover, these claims have significant implications of their own about semantic, functional, and epistemic features of our mental lives. But what are the conditions on a mental state's having one type of constituent structure rather than another? Drawing on explanatory strategies in vision science, I argue that, other things being equal, the constituent structure of a mental state determines what I call its distributional properties—namely, how mental states of that type can, cannot, or must co‐occur with other mental states in a given system. Distributional properties depend critically on and are informative about the underlying structures of mental states, they abstract in important ways from aspects of how mental states are processed, and they can yield significant insights into the variegation of psychological capacities. (shrink)

The temporal unity of multimodal audio–visual experiences seems to be stronger than their spatial unity. In particular, when one has an ordinary audio–visual experience, one is able to recognize that there is a non-visual part of space—behind one's head—but one is not aware of purely visual or auditory parts of time. This paper investigates the spatiotemporal unity of audio–visual experiences by applying a distinction between experiential contents and experiential structures, that is, relatively invariant ways of organizing content. General structural factors (...) that determine multimodal unity are identified, which are also likely to be relevant to other types of multimodal experiences. In particular, it is shown that certain relationships between so-called ‘limitation structural boundaries’ lead to a limited multimodal unity where one is aware of unimodal parts of a multimodal experiential structure. (shrink)

Abstract — Finger I: Structural Block Theory -/- Structural Block Theory (SBT) extends Structural Resonance Theory (SRT) by formalizing the granularity of conscious experience as a necessary consequence of finite integration under constraint. Rather than treating consciousness as continuous, atomic, representational, or computational, SBT defines experience as occurring in maximal contiguous intervals of threshold-satisfying resonance integration, termed experiential blocks. Blocks are not perceptual snapshots or symbolic units, but structurally delimited integration regimes whose existence, duration, and dominance are governed by integration (...) density, constraint topology, and update nontriviality. -/- The theory derives experiential discreteness without appealing to phenomenology or fixed sampling rates, showing that block formation follows inevitably from finite integration capacity, variable constraints, and the impossibility of perfectly coherent, update-invariant states. Attention is formalized as a weighting function over competing blocks rather than as a gate or generator of experience, resolving long-standing dissociations between attention and awareness. Memory is reframed as attractor-level bias that increases block re-instantiation probability rather than as stored content, while sleep and dreaming are modeled as constraint-relaxed regimes enabling block dissolution, recombination, and structural maintenance. Pathological states are analyzed as systematic distortions of block dynamics, including fragmentation, over-stabilization, boundary failure, and identity decoupling. -/- By specifying explicit formal definitions, operational hooks, and falsifiable constraints, Structural Block Theory provides a disciplined, substrate-neutral account of experiential segmentation compatible with neuroscience and dynamical systems theory while avoiding panpsychism, representationalism, and reductive elimination. (shrink)

It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations visà- vis large-scale injustice? In this paper, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed and unorganised groups of people are (...) often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense. (shrink)

Since Benacerraf’s ‘What Numbers Could Not Be, ’ there has been a growing interest in mathematical structuralism. An influential form of mathematical structuralism, modal structuralism, uses logical possibility and second order logic to provide paraphrases of mathematical statements which don’t quantify over mathematical objects. These modal structuralist paraphrases are a useful tool for nominalists and realists alike. But their use of second order logic and quantification into the logical possibility operator raises concerns. In this paper, I show (...) that the work of both these elements can be done by a single natural generalization of the logical possibility operator. (shrink)

Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained. Thus, Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch (...) calls the explanation-challenge (EC) for the metaphysics of necessity. Without endorsing the EC, I argue that Hale’s argument for basic, unexplained necessities fails due to a misunderstanding of the structure of essentialist explanations. Getting clear about the structure of essentialist explanations of necessity leads to a re-evaluation of crucial circularity- and regress-arguments that have been discussed in the debate about essentialism. (shrink)

As the name suggests, Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) entails the claim that structure is all there is. However, several critics have argued that OSR’s ontology is incomplete. There must be something ontologically significant beyond structure. I will suggest an ontology for these critics, one that invokes what Ladyman and Ross call “Kantian residue”. In doing so, I modify Rae Langton’s Kantian humility thesis to incorporate some extra-structural noumenal “something=x” (as Kant puts it). This involves positing (a) that a mysterious something=x (...) exists and (b) that something=x is responsible for structure (specifically structure’s non-arbitrary properties). Responsibility is a modal relation that is potentially equivalent to some asymmetric relation (causation, explanation, determination, grounding, or the like). Regarding the nature of something=x, I argue in deflationary spirit that we can only know that it is that which is responsible for structure. (shrink)

Informal rigour is the process by which we come to understand particular mathematical structures and then manifest this rigour through axiomatisations. Structural relativity is the idea that the kinds of structures we isolate are dependent upon the logic we employ. We bring together these ideas by considering the level of informal rigour exhibited by our set-theoretic discourse, and argue that different foundational programmes should countenance different underlying logics (intermediate between first- and second-order) for formulating set theory. By bringing considerations of (...) perturbations in modal space to bear on the debate, we will suggest that a promising option for representing current set-theoretic thought is given by formulating set theory using quasi-weak second-order logic. These observations indicate that the usual division of structures into \particular (e.g. the natural number structure) and general (e.g. the group structure) is perhaps too coarse grained; we should also make a distinction between intentionally and unintentionally general structures. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge and adjudicate between the two positions that have come to prominence in the scientific realism debate: deployment realism and structural realism. I discuss a set of cases from the history of celestial mechanics, including some of the most important successes in the history of science. To the surprise of the deployment realist, these are novel predictive successes toward which theoretical constituents that are now seen to be patently false were genuinely deployed. Exploring the implications for (...) structural realism, I show that the need to accommodate these cases forces our notion of “structure” toward a dramatic depletion of logical content, threatening to render it explanatorily vacuous: the better structuralism fares against these historical examples, in terms of retention, the worse it fares in content and explanatory strength. I conclude by considering recent restrictions that serve to make “structure” more specific. I show however that these refinements will not suffice: the better structuralism fares in specificity and explanatory strength, the worse it fares against history. In light of these case studies, both deployment realism and structural realism are significantly threatened by the very historical challenge they were introduced to answer. (shrink)

This text proposes a structural understanding of philosophy as a system of thought reproduction. Philosophy is defined here not as abstract contemplation, but as a condition in which thought patterns are precisely structured and continue to operate beyond the life of the thinker. Based on this definition, this work argues that the same structural principle appears in two domains across history: philosophy and brand. While philosophy transmits thought as doctrine, brand transmits spirit as structure. This paper articulates the architecture through (...) which thought becomes reproducible, actionable, and economically sustainable without losing its philosophical integrity. (shrink)

This paper proposes to present a (structural) ontology of the relationship from the articulation between form, content and structure. Reexamining fundamental concepts of logic and semantics, such as proposition, meaning and truth, the text argues that form and content do not constitute autonomous domains, but functional moments of the same structural complex. Truth is conceived as an identity between logical operator, proposition and fact [ T(p) ⮂ F ], which implies an integration between the syntactic, semantic and ontological levels of (...) language. Drawing inspiration from Bourbaki's (and Puntel's) notion of structure and developing a relational metaphysics, the essay argues that everything that can be thought, said, or known constitutes a relation. Form rules, content determines, and complex structures; Being thus manifests itself as a network of disjunctive metaphysical intervals between distinct terms. Logic, semantics, and ontology are not separated, but converge within a single relational network of the real. (shrink)

Recent accounts of actual causation are stated in terms of extended causal models. These extended causal models contain two elements representing two seemingly distinct modalities. The first element are structural equations which represent the or mechanisms of the model, just as ordinary causal models do. The second element are ranking functions which represent normality or typicality. The aim of this paper is to show that these two modalities can be unified. I do so by formulating two constraints under which extended (...) causal models with their two modalities can be subsumed under so called which contain just one modality. These two constraints will be formally precise versions of Lewissystem of weights or priorities” governing overall similarity between possible worlds. (shrink)

Reflection on the historical injustice suffered by many formerly colonized groups has left us with a peculiar account of their claims to material objects. One important upshot of that account, relevant to present day justice, is that many people seem to think that members of indigenous groups have special claims to the use of particular external objects by virtue of their attachment to them. In the first part of this paper I argue against that attachment-based claim. In the second part (...) I suggest that, to provide a normatively defensible account of why sometimes agents who are attached to certain external objects might also have special claims over them, the most important consideration is whether the agents making such claims suffer from structural injustice in the present. In the third part I try to explain why structural injustice matters, in what way attachment-based claims relate to it and when they count. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine different views of the structure of justification, including foundationalism, infinitism, and coherentism. We investigate how well or poorly they seem to do in responding to the regress problem, accommodating a robust connection between justification and truth, and getting the contours of justification right—i.e., making justification neither too easy nor too hard to get. We end by briefly discussing some challenges to finding a single sense of “foundational belief” defining the debate.

Probability was never fundamental—only an epistemic placeholder for unresolved phase structure. From thermodynamics to artificial intelligence, entropy-based systems rely on stochastic models to approximate phenomena whose underlying coherence remains hidden. This paper introduces CODES (Chirality of Dynamic Emergent Systems), a unified framework in which sensing, inference, and cognition emerge from structured resonance, not randomness—anchored by chirality and prime-indexed attractors. At the system level, we present the Phase Alignment Score (PAS), a lawful coherence metric that replaces probabilistic inference with threshold-based signal (...) validation. Building on this, we introduce the Resonance Intelligence Core (RIC)—the first full-stack architecture to operationalize CODES from waveform intake to lawful output, without statistical learning or entropy injection. Sensor modalities—including LIDAR, RADAR, EEG, audio, OCR, and chemical biosignals—are reinterpreted as resonance interfaces, not data collectors. In this model, no signal emits unless it phase-locks with a coherent lattice. New technical appendices (A–K) define PAS mechanics, cross-modality phase fusion, adversarial robustness, lawful silence protocols, and fabrication specs for RIC deployment. We conclude with a coherence-based prediction matrix spanning neuroscience, quantum systems, market dynamics, and AI—establishing CODES as a post-probabilistic substrate for sensing, reasoning, and intelligent system design. (shrink)

A prominent version of mathematical structuralism holds that mathematical objects are at bottom nothing but "positions in structures," purely relational entities without any sort of nature independent of the structure to which they belong. Such an ontology is often presented as a response to Benacerraf's "multiple reductions" problem, or motivated on hermeneutic grounds, as a faithful representation of the discourse and practice of mathematics. In this paper I argue that there are serious difficulties with this kind of view: its (...) proponents rely on a distinction between "essential" and "nonessential" features of mathematical objects, and there's no good way to articulate this distinction which is compatible with basic structuralist commitments. But all is not lost. For I further argue that the insights motivating structuralism (or at least those worth preserving) can be preserved without formulating the view in ontologically committal terms. (shrink)

This paper formalizes planning and insight as emergent phenomena arising from structural reconfiguration within finite, dynamically constrained cognitive spaces. Departing from representational, search-based, and optimization-centric accounts, it advances a non-teleological framework in which planning is understood as pre-stabilized trajectory biasing and insight as a topological discontinuity in the navigable configuration space of a system. Rather than modeling cognition as symbol manipulation or utility maximization, the framework treats intelligent behavior as the modulation of constraint weights governing accessible transitions. -/- The paper (...) introduces a geometric account of insight in which sudden problem-solving breakthroughs correspond to discrete changes in connectivity—specifically, the emergence or dissolution of connected components within the system’s effective constraint graph. These transitions are not gradual accumulations of information but phase-like reconfigurations driven by internal constraint relaxation, reweighting, or resonance alignment. This explains the phenomenology of “Aha” moments, their abruptness, and their resistance to introspective reconstruction. -/- Planning, on this account, is not foresight over an objective future state space but the stabilization of local directional bias under bounded uncertainty. Plans are temporary constraint alignments that shape near-term trajectories without implying global optimality, convergence, or teleological direction. The paper demonstrates how planning failure, rigidity, and overcommitment arise when constraint weights become prematurely stabilized, reducing navigable volume and suppressing adaptive reconfiguration. -/- The framework yields multiple falsifiable predictions distinguishing it from dominant models, including discontinuous signatures in behavioral latency distributions, measurable changes in topological invariants of neural or behavioral state-space reconstructions surrounding insight events, and characteristic failure modes under artificially induced constraint fixation. By grounding planning and insight in constraint geometry rather than representational content, the paper provides a unified, non-teleological account of intelligent discontinuity consistent with finite physical substrates and open-ended exploration. (shrink)

This note provides a self-contained, operational case-study template for applying Structural Distance Theory (SDT) to institutional failure. Using Enron as a motivating example, we (i) specify an SDT network with weighted directed relations encoding visibility, feedback fidelity, and consequence coupling; (ii) define downstream end-states representing grounded reality; and (iii) introduce a minimal drift simulation demonstrating how gradual insulation of an upstream decision node can increase structural distance over abstract steps. The purpose is methodological: to show how SDT can be instantiated (...) and run as a diagnostic procedure. The simulation is intended to demonstrate qualitative dynamics and feasibility (including directionality constraints) rather than reconstruct historical timing or provide predictive claims. (shrink)

This work develops an ontological framework underlying contemporary physical theories, addressing a gap between formal admissibility and physical realization. Modern physics—quantum field theory, special relativity, and general relativity—successfully constrains admissible states, relations, and transitions, yet remains largely silent on how admissible structures become realized physical facts. This paper argues that the limitation is ontological rather than dynamical or epistemic. Two complementary notions are introduced. Structural indifference is the principle according to which physical structure distinguishes roles and invariants, but not the (...) individual identity of the carriers realizing those roles. The coherence operator enforces relational compatibility among admissible roles, ensuring that realized parameter assignments are mutually consistent without fixing absolute numerical values. Together, these notions explain how observable universality can arise without global uniformity of laws or constants. Local variability of parameters becomes compatible with stable structure, while identical observational patterns emerge through coherence and translatability rather than numerical identity. Quantum mechanics is shown to be complete at the level of admissibility but ontologically incomplete with respect to realization. Gravity is interpreted as a global modulator of structural indifference, shaping large-scale regimes of realization without altering quantum formalism. The framework does not modify existing physical theories, introduce new dynamics, or rely on probabilistic selection. Instead, it articulates an ontological layer beneath current formalisms, clarifying why physical description works, how realization occurs, and why identity fixation is unnecessary. (shrink)