Conceptual framework demonstrates geometric diagnostic capabilities across human institutions, highlighting category errors as drivers of organizational dysfunction.
We extend the Category Error Detector (CED) beyond computational systems to human organizations, institutions, and cultures. The CED is a portable geometric diagnostic — it scans any system for structural misalignment across five nodes: Axes, Interface, Projection, Lagrangian, and Attractors. We show that category errors are not merely logical mistakes — they manifest as mission drift, bureaucratic inertia, cultural fragmentation, and leadership collapse. The CED provides a practical lens for diagnosing and correcting these misalignments. This paper is a field guide for applying the CED in the wild
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Theriault et al. (2026) studied this question.
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