How the project works
This document records the methodological commitments that govern the project. It serves two purposes: internal discipline (a constraint on what counts as progress) and external transparency (a reader can see what the project is doing and hold it to its own standards).
Meta-commitments
The project is systematic in the sense that its claims are intended to be mutually consistent, derivable from a small number of foundational commitments, and applicable across domains without requiring domain-specific ad hoc additions. A claim that can only be maintained by treating one domain as exceptional is a signal of a problem in the system, not a license to proceed.
The project is honest about its epistemic status. The distinction between stub, seedling, developing, settled, and formal marks real differences in how much work has been done. Formal means published in peer-reviewed form. Stub means the claim is named and placed but not yet argued for. The system makes these distinctions visible rather than presenting all claims as equally established.
Structural commitments
The system uses a portable conceptual vocabulary developed across papers. A concept is portable if it can be introduced in one domain and applied in another without modification — that is, if its application in the second domain does not require the introduction of new conceptual machinery specific to that domain.
The portability requirement is what makes cross-domain unification possible and meaningful. If the concept of a worldframe required different elaboration in the quantum case than in the modal case, the apparent unification would be cosmetic. The test of genuine unification is whether the same concept, with the same formal content, addresses the different problems.
Paper-level requirements
Each paper must satisfy four requirements to count as formally complete: first, it must state the problem being addressed and explain why existing approaches fail; second, it must introduce the system's resources clearly enough that a reader unfamiliar with the broader project can follow the argument; third, it must make at least one claim that is falsifiable — that is, it must have commitments specific enough to be wrong; and fourth, it must acknowledge what the argument does not establish.
Portable concepts
The portable concepts are introduced across papers and accumulate meaning as they are applied. Freedom, worldframe, and monad are introduced in the foundational papers and used throughout. The formal apparatus — R_monad, coherence functional, measure function — is introduced in the quantum papers but applies wherever the system's formal claims are relevant.
Concepts are not defined once and then treated as settled. As the system develops, earlier formulations may be refined in light of what later papers require. The methodology requires that such refinements be explicit and that their consequences for earlier papers be tracked.
What this commits to
The project is committed to the following: that there is a structural feature common to the four domains addressed; that this feature can be formally characterized; that the characterization is not just a redescription of the problems but a dissolution or resolution of them; and that the portable conceptual vocabulary developed in the project is adequate to this task.
These are substantial commitments. The project may fail to fulfill them. The epistemic status indicators are there precisely to track where it has succeeded, where it is in progress, and where it remains promissory.