Coherence Structure and Translation: A Diagnostic Toolkit for Ontological Articulation

Description / Abstract:Ontologies of mind and nature connect physical, mental, and formal descriptions of a phenomenon. The standard demand that such connections be made explicit leaves open where, exactly, the connection can fail. CST is a diagnostic toolkit that addresses this gap: it identifies six structural points at which a cross-domain claim characteristically fails. The toolkit asks what structure any ontology must provide that its translations between domains count as coherent. Two of the six audit sites carry distinctive structural content. The first concerns the reconstruction of mental content in formal terms: an admissible reconstruction recovers a specified mental core, but need not exhaust the formal medium-locating a principled place for formal surplus rather than treating its presence as failure. The second concerns chains of translation: pairwise acceptable steps need not yield an acceptable composite, because the relevant invariants may fail to survive the transition between steps. Both points receive a category-theoretic formulation, but their philosophical content does not depend on the formalism. A worked example for an audit and a comparison of reductive physicalism, dualism, neutral monism, and structural realism show that the toolkit locates a different characteristic burden in each architecture.