Retire, Don't Iterate: Coordination Failure Without a Convergence Target

A theoretical construct can fail without ever being empirically tested: it can fail coordination — be internally coherent and physically motivated, yet admit no procedure, forced by the subject matter, for measuring one of its terms. The phenomenon is classical, familiar from operationism (Bridgman 1927), the coordination problem (Reichenbach; van Fraassen 2008; Tal 2013), and the problem of nomic measurement (Chang 2004); that the standard remedy — epistemic iteration — requires the competing operations to converge is equally established. This note claims none of that as new. Its narrower contribution: when a construct's operations disagree and will not converge, the literature offers three responses — iterate, quantify-and-proceed (metrology's definitional uncertainty), and pluralism. This note argues for a fourth, for the sub-case the first three do not cover — when the operations track genuinely distinct attributes rather than one imperfectly, so that iteration has no target and pluralism has no shared referent, the construct should be retired. A worked instance from astrophysics is given (a timescale-ratio construct whose "disruption timescale" term admits three non-converging operationalizations), together with a tentative pre-registration convention that routes such cases to retirement before they are correlated with any outcome, positioned honestly against definitional uncertainty, specification-curve analysis, and measurement invariance.