A Prospective Warrant for Objective Modal Structure: Modal Glueability in Structural Realism

How can commitment to objective modal structure be warranted before later theories show what has survived theory change? For structural realism, this is the retrospective-selection problem in its modal form. This paper develops Modal Glueability as an answer. Taking the ontology of effective descriptions as a test case, I formulate explicit conditions for a nontrivial modal-regime warrant: it goes beyond an empiricist catalogue of local successes, but does not require identifying the regime with any privileged mathematics or theory. The main result shows that, for any finite set of comparable scientific descriptions, this warrant can be earned from presently inspectable features of a disciplined comparison practice. It therefore does not rely on any pairwise stories of retention or succession. Finally, I argue that carrying this warrant over to wider comparisons has a clear price: the structural realist must be able to maintain the comparison conditions that made the present warrant possible. This preprint substantially develops and partly supersedes my earlier Zenodo preprint, “From Modal Proliferation to Glueability: Effective OSR and the Saatsi-Worry Extension” (10.5281/zenodo.20132165). It is deposited as aseparate work because its central framing, theorem, and scope differ substantially.