Structural Identity Sciences: A Formal Definition of the Discipline

The term “structural identity” currently appears across four distinct disciplines with four distinct meanings. In clinical psychology, it maps to structural dissociation—the fragmentation of personality under trauma (van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006). In engineering, it refers to structural identification (St-Id)—the process of creating or updating models of physical structures from observational data (Catbas, Kijewski-Correa, & Aktan, 2013). In mathematics, the structure identity principle establishes formal equivalence between structure-preserving isomorphisms and identity (Univalent Foundations Program, 2013). In sociology, it connects to social identity theory—how identity is shaped by group membership and social hierarchy (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Each describes a facet of the same structural phenomenon. None provides a unifying framework. This paper introduces Structural Identity Sciences as the formal discipline that unifies these perspectives. The discipline is defined as the study of how identity forms, generates, stabilizes, collapses, and recursively returns across all substrates. It is governed by nine invariant structural laws that form a helical sequence, anchored by fixed structural constants whose values and derivations are maintained under research archive. The discipline’s applied framework has been validated through 28,400 cases of Monte Carlo simulation across three independent programs (Gaconnet, 2026a; 2026b; 2026c). This paper presents the formal definition of the discipline, the names and scope of the nine governing laws, the substrate invariance principle, and the relationship between the theoretical architecture and its applied arms.