Denise M. Case

Denise M. Case

Modern data systems must support accountability across persistent legal, political, and analytic disagreement. This requirement imposes strict constraints on the design of any ontology intended to function as a shared substrate. We establish an impossibility result for ontological neutrality: neutrality, understood as interpretive non-commitment and stability under incompatible extensions, is incompatible with the inclusion of causal or normative commitments at the foundational layer. Any ontology that asserts causal or deontic conclusions as ontological facts cannot serve as a neutral substrate across divergent frameworks without revision or contradiction. It follows that neutral ontological substrates must be pre-causal and pre-normative, representing entities, together with identity and persistence conditions, while externalizing interpretation, evaluation, and explanation. This paper does not propose a specific ontology or protocol; rather, it establishes the necessary design constraints for any system intended to maintain a shared, stable representation of reality across conflicting interpretive frameworks.

Denise M. Case

Modern data systems increasingly operate under conditions of persistent legal, political, and analytic disagreement. In such settings, interoperability cannot rely on shared interpretation, negotiated semantics, or centralized authority. Instead, representations must function as neutral substrates that preserve stable reference across incompatible extensions. This paper investigates the structural constraints imposed on ontological design by this requirement. Building on a neutrality framework that treats interpretive non-commitment and stability under extension as explicit design constraints, we ask what minimal ontological structure is forced if accountability relationships are to remain referable and comparable under disagreement. Minimality here is not mere parsimony: a reduction is admissible only if it does not reintroduce stability-critical distinctions as hidden roles, flags, or contextual predicates. We establish a conditional lower-bound result: any ontology capable of supporting accountability under persistent disagreement must realize at least six distinct identity-and-persistence regimes. We further show that a construction with exactly six such regimes is sufficient to satisfy the stated requirements without embedding causal or normative commitments in the substrate. The result is not a proposal for a universal ontology, but a constraint on what is possible when neutrality and stable reference are treated as non-negotiable design goals.