Substrate Stability Under Persistent Disagreement: Structural Constraints for Neutral Ontological Substrates
This addresses the challenge of interoperability in data systems without shared interpretation or centralized authority, though it appears incremental as it builds on an existing neutrality framework.
The paper tackles the problem of designing data systems that maintain stable reference across incompatible extensions under persistent disagreement, establishing that any ontology supporting accountability in such settings must implement at least six distinct identity-and-persistence regimes and showing a six-regime construction is sufficient without embedding commitments.
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.