The Inverse Constraint Hypothesis: Language's Conditioning Power as a Function of Domain Sensory Verifiability

This paper proposes the Inverse Constraint Hypothesis (ICH): language’s conditioning power over cognition varies inversely with the sensory verifiability of the domain. The gradient is a competitive ratio between bottom-up sensory correction and the precision-weighting of linguistically structured priors. Sensory verifiability decomposes into three independently measurable conditions—biological channel availability, spatiotemporal proximity, and referentindependence from symbolic agreement—each assessable with existing instruments (LancasterSensorimotor Norms, interoceptive accuracy tasks).Drawing on predictive processing (Friston, 2010; Clark, 2013) and the Embodied Predictive Interoception Coding (EPIC) model (Barrett & Simmons, 2015), the hypothesis shows that as physical constraints weaken, a somatic feedback loop emerges: linguistically generated predictions trigger autonomic mobilization, the body reports the resulting state as confirmatory evidence, and the prediction system gates its own correction channel via the thalamic reticular nucleus. Each unchecked cycle accumulates allostatic load (McEwen & Stellar, 1993). The ICH integrates and extends grounded cognition, linguistic relativity, label-feedback (Lupyan et al., 2020), constructed emotion (Barrett, 2017), and the REBUS hierarchy (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019) by identifying the structural variable that determines effect magnitude. It draws convergent support from cross-linguistic perception, clinical populations (PTSD, panic disorder, health anxiety), and emerging work on physical invariants (Friedrich et al., 2024, 2025) and allostatic-interoceptive overload (Santamaría-García et al., 2025). Five testable predictions follow, including interoceptive accuracy as a moderator of abstract-domain framing effects and psychedelic compression of the abstract–concrete gap. The framework reframes perceptual autonomy, institutional language use, and vocabulary loss as questions of constraint rather than mere semantics.