68. Diorthics: Terse Axioms
——— DIORTHICS ———
The Grammar of Coherence
I. Foundational Commitments
Axiom 0 — The Fact of Presentation
Whatever can be described, tested, or denied is already present in some manner.
We call this minimal condition presentation—the occurrence of identifiable content within some operational context.
No further metaphysical assumption is required: presentation is the bare condition of anything being discussable at all.
Definition 0 — Context (C)
A context is any organized situation of presentation that allows distinctions, relations, and evaluations to occur.
It need not be conscious, physical, divine, or linguistic—it is simply the domain in which difference and rule can operate.
All reasoning, perception, or measurement takes place within some context.
II. The Building Blocks of Sense
Definition 1 — Token (τ)
A token is any repeatable differentiator that can be recognized again within a context—mark, sound, symbol, variable, gesture, datum.
Tokens carry no fixed meaning outside the rules that regulate them.
Definition 2 — Rule (ρ)
A rule specifies permitted relations among tokens: composition, inference, transformation, or measurement.
Rules are the internal grammar that turns token-collections into intelligible configurations.
Definition 3 — Adjudicator (α)
Every context possesses one or more adjudicators—criteria or procedures that decide when a rule-governed configuration counts as successful.
Examples include experiment, logical derivation, revelation, phenomenological adequacy, communal uptake, aesthetic resonance.
The adjudicator is what lets outcomes be marked true, valid, provable, lawful, fitting, beautiful, holy, etc.
Definition 4 — Authentication (⊩)
To authenticate a configuration is to apply the context’s rules under its adjudicator and record a verdict.
Authentication has three canonical results: accept, reject, suspend.
Definition 5 — Frame (F)
A frame is the complete coherence-system that unites tokens, rules, adjudicator, scope, and authentication procedure.
A frame is not a worldview; it is the local mechanics by which a worldview operates.
III. Structural Axioms
Axiom 1 — Contextuality
Every expression, observation, or law is intelligible only within a frame.
Outside its frame, its tokens lose adjudicative purchase.
Axiom 2 — No View From Nowhere
Any claim about frames is itself issued from some meta-frame F′.
There is no neutral position outside all contexts.
Hence every “absolute” statement is, at minimum, indexed—true-in-F′.
Axiom 3 — Separation Requirement
Within a frame, the tokens that serve as adjudicators (truth, valid, provable, holy, etc.) must not be applied to their own operation at the same level.
Adjudicator and expression must remain distinct.
When that distinction collapses, authentication destabilizes.
Axiom 4 — Viability Constraint
A frame persists only while it maintains internal coherence under its own feedback.
Coherence here means the capacity to absorb anomalies through adjustment rather than disintegration.
What cannot sustain correction eventually ceases to function as a frame.
IV. Derived Theorems
Theorem 1 — Level Mixing
When a frame reuses its own adjudicative machinery within itself—without index shift or separation—evaluation oscillates or stalls.
This is the generic form of paradox, vagueness, and self-undermining discourse.
Repair consists of restoring level difference: either lift evaluation to a meta-frame (frame-first repair) or revise the expression so it no longer violates grammar (expression-first repair).
Theorem 2 — Frame Relativity of Verdict-Words
“Truth,” “proof,” “reality,” and similar verdict-words are indexicals of adjudication.
Their content is fixed only by the rules and adjudicator of the frame in which they occur.
Cross-frame disagreement arises when verdict-words are exported without re-indexing.
Theorem 3 — The Limit of Totalization
No frame can coherently declare itself complete, since doing so applies its own adjudicator to its total field of operation.
Such totalization violates the Separation Requirement and generates self-reference.
Therefore every viable frame must mark its own horizon of competence.
Theorem 4 — Conceptual Homeostasis
Because tokens drift and contexts evolve, frames must continuously recalibrate to preserve coherence.
Repair, revision, and reinterpretation are not failures but the normal metabolism of meaning.
Theorem 5 — The Diagnostic Principle
Apparent contradictions signal overlap or fusion of frames, not defects in logic or reality.
Philosophy’s diagnostic task is to re-differentiate the frames involved until each can authenticate within its own bounds.
V. Corollaries and Clarifications
Corollary 1 — Two Families of Repair
All historical paradox-resolutions fall into two structural families:
1) Expression-first repairs—tighten grammar to disallow malformed self-use.
2) Frame-first repairs—expand or stratify the adjudicator’s domain.
Both restore the same separation and therefore count as Diorthic repair.
Corollary 2 — Viability and Value
Enduring systems—scientific, religious, artistic, or philosophical—survive not because they are “ultimately true” but because they remain viable under their characteristic pressures.
Empirical frames answer to prediction; moral frames to conscience; aesthetic frames to resonance; contemplative frames to direct seeing.
Each lives by its own adjudicator.
Corollary 3 — Paradox as Feedback
When a frame encounters an insoluble expression, that expression functions as a diagnostic signal: a request for re-indexing.
Paradox is not a failure of sense but sense discovering its boundary.
VI. Meta-Axioms
Meta-Axiom 1 — Reflexive Applicability
Diorthics applies to itself.
Its own claims are true-in-Diorthics, not outside all framing.
Acknowledging this prevents it from committing the very flattening it diagnoses.
Meta-Axiom 2 — Philosophical Function
Philosophy, redefined Diorthically, is the maintenance of intelligibility across shifting frames—
the craft of repairing level boundaries so that discourse, science, and life remain coherent under change.
VII. Closing Reflection
Diorthics does not ask what is real, divine, mental, or material.
It asks how any of those vocabularies remain coherent long enough to be discussed.
It is neither idealist, materialist, theist, nor nondualist, yet each finds its articulation within it.
Its universality is grammatical, not metaphysical: the study of how contexts keep sense from collapsing when they encounter themselves.
Where other philosophies describe the world, Diorthics describes description itself—the rules by which worlds of meaning stay standing.