This paper develops Representational Sealing Theory (ReST), a theory of the limits encountered by any inquiry that turns to ask after its own preconditions. Its premise is a claim in the philosophy of representation: theoretical representation of a domain is conducted within a structured system of admissible distinction and inference, and that structure constitutes, rather than merely accompanies, what such representation can represent. From this premise the paper derives a ‘representational seal’: a domain dependent upon a prior generative condition cannot theoretically represent the intrinsic nature of that condition, since its only means of representation is a structure the condition does not share. What such a domain may establish is thin and exact: that it has a generative condition, and that the condition was adequate to it. The paper’s principal positive consequence concerns time. A generated domain must represent its own states as non-self-grounding, as referring beyond themselves to a condition it cannot represent. These features are identified as the materials of temporal order: not a single succession, and not the arrow of time, but the dependence-character through which generatedness appears from within. The account is distinguished from relational theories of time, in particular Rovelli’s. Its bounds are stated explicitly: the seal supplies the materials of temporal order, but not their assembly into a single succession, nor the orientation of such a succession. The account contributes nothing to the content of physics; it is a constraint on how a domain may theorise its own preconditions.
Peter Kahl (Sat,) studied this question.