Substrate Stability Under Persistent Disagreement: Structural Constraints for Neutral Ontological Substrates

TL;DR

This paper explores the minimal structural requirements for ontologies to maintain stable reference and accountability in data systems operating under persistent disagreement, establishing a lower bound of six identity regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a neutrality framework for ontological design, proving a lower bound of six identity regimes necessary for stable reference under disagreement.

Findings

Any ontology supporting accountability under disagreement must have at least six identity regimes.

A construction with exactly six regimes suffices for stable reference without normative commitments.

The results constrain possible ontological structures for neutral, stable data representations.

Abstract

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.