The Ontological Neutrality Theorem: Why Neutral Ontological Substrates Must Be Pre-Causal and Pre-Normative

TL;DR

This paper proves that neutral ontological substrates cannot include causal or normative commitments and must be pre-causal and pre-normative to support stable, shared representations across conflicting frameworks.

Contribution

It establishes an impossibility theorem showing that neutrality conflicts with causal and normative commitments, defining necessary constraints for shared ontologies.

Findings

Neutral ontologies cannot incorporate causal or normative facts.

Neutral substrates must be pre-causal and pre-normative.

The paper provides foundational constraints for designing shared ontologies.

Abstract

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.