Structural Explainability: Referential Regimes

Derives identity regimes that preserve stable reference when neutral substrates are transformed under persistent disagreement.

Paper Overview

• arXiv
• SciX

Main Contribution

This project derives a lower-bound identity constraint for neutral accountability records. When stable reference must be preserved across admissible frameworks, and causal or normative interpretation remains outside the substrate layer, reference kinds alone are insufficient. The substrate must also preserve the identity basis under which each referent remains the same through ordinary transformations.

The paper shows that six required reference kinds supply the carriers: obligation-bearers, rules, occurrences, scopes, records, and plain referents. Three of those kinds underdetermine identity. Plain referents may be locus-fixed or object-fixed. Scopes may be extension-fixed or structure-fixed. Rules may be content-fixed or structure-fixed. This transformation analysis forces at least nine identity regimes.

Nine-Regime Lower-Bound Core

Regime	Carrier	Identity basis	Forced by
OBL	Obligation-bearer	Responsibility-bearing identity	Required carrier in the accountability inventory
OCC	Occurrence	Realization-and-provenance identity	Required carrier in the accountability inventory
REC	Record	Descriptive-record identity	Required carrier in the accountability inventory
LOC	Plain referent	Locus-fixed identity	Branch/fork separates locus identity from object identity
OBJ	Plain referent	Object-fixed identity	Branch/fork separates object identity from locus identity
SCOPE-E	Scope	Extension-fixed identity	Aggregation/decomposition separates coverage from structure
SCOPE-S	Scope	Structure-fixed identity	Aggregation/decomposition separates structure from coverage
RULE-C	Rule	Content-fixed identity	Refinement separates rule content from rule structure
RULE-S	Rule	Structure-fixed identity	Refinement separates rule structure from rule content

Structural Explainability: Accountable Records Paper Series

Paper	Description
Neutral Substrates	Defines the neutrality constraint. A neutral substrate preserves shared reference and attribution without adopting contested causal or normative interpretations as substrate-level commitments.
Referential Regimes	Derives the identity cost of the neutrality constraint. Shows stable reference under persistent disagreement requires transformation-invariant identity regimes and derives a nine-regime lower-bound core.
Accountable Records	Develops the conformance layer for deployed record systems. Studies how basis declarations, transformation logs, and schema checks can make neutral-substrate identity commitments inspectable in practice.

Links

• Paper 1 SE 100: Neutral Substrates
• Paper 2 SE 200: Referential Regimes (9) PDF

Building Locally

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texcount -inc -sum -total se200_referential_regimes.tex

Windows:

.\tools\build\build.ps1
.\size.ps1
texcount -merge -sub=section -inc -sum se200_referential_regimes.tex

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git tag -d v0.3.0
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git tag v0.3.0 -m "0.3.0"
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Annotations

ANNOTATIONS.md

Citation

See CITATION.cff.

License

CC BY 4.0

SE Manifest

SE_MANIFEST

Validate with:

uvx se-manifest-schema validate-manifest --path SE_MANIFEST.toml --strict

References

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3. Case, D. M. (2026). Neutral Substrates: A Design Constraint for Shared Records Under Persistent Interpretive Disagreement. arXiv:2601.14271. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14271

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13. Kutz, O., Mossakowski, T., and Lücke, D. (2010). "Carnap, Goguen, and the hyperontologies: Logical pluralism and heterogeneous structuring in ontology design." Logica Universalis, 4(2):255–333.

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