A Non-Inheritance Principle for Consciousness Research: Evidence, Classification, and Common Structure

Consciousness research contains several distinct transfer problems: from reports or neural signals to target states, from target states to consciousness classifications, from coarse to fine grains, and from shared classifications to claims of common underlying structure. This paper argues that these problems instantiate a single methodological restriction, the Non-Inheritance Principle: warrant established for one analytical target, grain, inferential role, or validated scope does not by itself warrant a different target, grain, role, or broader scope. Bridges may be justified, but their basis and scope must be independently specified. The framework is developed as a Source–Target–Warrant–Scope audit and applied to multidimensional accounts, no-report paradigms, natural-kind approaches, color perception, pain, skilled action, dreaming, cognitive motor dissociation, unity, boundary, and conscious content. A worked audit of cognitive motor dissociation shows how the same evidence can strongly support task-specific internal processing while a further consciousness classification remains conditional on an additional bridge. The paper also distinguishes classificatory commonality from evidential and state commonality, and an intuitive remainder from a structural remainder. It asks what would be required to identify “experience” as a common variable rather than merely name what appears left after decomposition. The position is non-eliminativist: a common consciousness property may exist, but its existence is not secured by shared vocabulary, evidential convergence alone, or the stability of existing classifications.