Coherence Structure and Translation (CST) develops a category-theoretic framework for cross-realm coordination between physical processes, mental experience, and formal structures such as language, logic, and mathematics. The central problem: how do these three domains cohere in everyday acts of perception, communication, and measurement — and what goes structurally wrong when they fail to do so? CST answers this question by identifying six coherence principles (O1–O6) and showing that their violations correspond to six typed breakdown patterns (B1–B6). The six breakdowns are: (B1) collapse — illegitimate identification of physically and mentally described states; (B2) incommunicability — the privacy of qualia as a translation failure; (B3) route divergence — incompatible outcomes across distinct translation paths; (B4) modular instability — failure of coherence under sequential composition; (B5) scope error — application of translations outside their valid domain; (B6) disunity — failure to integrate locally coherent pieces into a global whole. CST is not a metaphysical theory of what the three domains ultimately are. It specifies what any account committed to their joint usability must preserve on declared interfaces. The framework is practice-relative and empirically assessable: the six principles generate concrete diagnostics for the explanatory gap in philosophy of mind, neural decoding protocols in cognitive neuroscience, calibration failures in measurement practice, context-window sensitivity in large language models, and the binding problem in consciousness research. The paper is self-contained with an extended categorical appendix. It is intended as a companion to a forthcoming paper on Structural Panmentalism (SPM), which develops the ontological dimension of the framework.
Thomas Pitz (Tue,) studied this question.