Architecture, problem setting, and research program
Contemporary knowledge environments are increasingly shaped by conflicts over what counts as real, valid, and epistemically binding. Scientific models are often implicitly ontologized and overextended, subjective experience and social order are either reduced or pushed into a vague remainder, and domain transitions remain tacit. In many cases, the underlying conditions of stabilization, load, revision, and abandonment of models are not made explicit.
Epistemics develops a conceptual infrastructure for analyzing model formation under finite conditions. The focus is not on grounding truth in a metaphysical sense, but on clarifying validity, domains, stabilization, cost profiles, and friction as a boundary signal of limited load-bearing capacity.
Knowledge operates under structural finitude. Stabilization is always bounded, and where limits are exceeded, friction emerges. Friction is not merely a disturbance but a diagnostic signal that makes finite load-bearing capacity readable.
Epistemics therefore differentiates subjective, intersubjective, and functional-empirical domains. Many epistemic and social conflicts are driven by tacit shifts between these domains, that is, by claims that change their mode of validity without explicit marking.
This foundational paper introduces the canonical framework of the project. It develops Epistemics as a system for managing models and model formation under finite conditions, and it establishes the key operational concepts: validity, domains, stabilization, revision, cost profiles, and friction. It functions as the infrastructural baseline for the entire research program.
This paper reconstructs ontologization functionally rather than metaphysically. Ontologization is analyzed as a necessary stabilization process by which finite epistemic systems render a dynamic experiential field manageable and referable. It also clarifies the characteristic malfunction: reifying functional set-ups into final descriptions of reality, thereby producing epistemic rigidity and revision resistance.
This paper develops friction as a structural concept for stability under load. Friction indicates where stabilization becomes disproportionately costly or loses load-bearing capacity. It functions as a diagnostic tool for overextension, externalization, and blocked revision, and it describes how friction generates selection effects over time between competing stabilization patterns.
This paper reconstructs scientific rationality beyond a binary Popperian picture. It distinguishes contextual from global falsification and integrates insights from Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, model theory, and approaches to approximate truth into a unified framework of model validity. Its function within the project is to make domain-specific validity conditions and model selection constraints explicit, including the enabling conditions under which certain models remain epistemically indispensable despite partial failures.
This paper develops an explicit switching architecture between stability consolidation and exploratory opening under finite conditions. Building on Epistemics and friction, search is reconstructed as a dynamic configuration of stabilized transition types. Friction functions as a diagnostic indicator of declining robustness gains relative to rising costs, marking structural switching points between optimization and exploration. The paper extends the infrastructural vocabulary of the project into a formal search architecture.
This paper develops revision as an autonomous epistemic basic operation of model management under finite conditions. It shows that scientific rationality consists not only in stabilization, friction, falsification, and search, but also in the controlled capacity to reorganize existing model orders under pressure. The paper defines revision as the mediating transformation operation between strain, loss of validity, exploratory opening, and renewed stabilization, and it clarifies its forms, triggers, criteria of rationality, and typical failure modes.
Relative Reality Theory provides an ordering framework for real-world reality conflicts. Reality is treated as a graded, context-dependent status rather than an absolute property. The framework differentiates modes and degrees of reality via experiential immediacy, intersubjective stability, and functional efficacy, helping to identify category errors, dissolve pseudo-conflicts, and explain why certain realities remain stable under contestation.
This paper proposes an alternative ordering to the classical physics–metaphysics split. It differentiates reality into distinct physics of stability, subjective, intersubjective, and functional-empirical, not as an ontological hierarchy but as domain-specific regimes of validity, stabilization mechanisms, load limits, and boundary signals. It shows how metaphysical functions can be reconstructed epistemically without ultimate ontological claims.
This paper analyzes persistent cosmological tensions not as mere data inconsistencies, but as indicators of architectural overextension. It argues that cosmological practice already operates with domain-specific modeling regimes without explicitly marking their domain dependence. Tensions appear as anomalies only because a unified world-model claim is maintained beyond its effective scope. The paper shifts the level of falsification from parameters to model architecture and interprets persistent tensions as structural reorganization signals.
This paper analyzes a structural limit of ontological materialism with respect to exclusive personal identity. It argues that under materialist assumptions and principled duplicability, standard functional, causal, and psychological criteria can be multiply satisfied without yielding a further criterion that fixes exclusive numerical identity. The paper functions as a boundary analysis of ontologization and reduction, clarifying where a worldview’s identity claims exceed what its own resources can determine.