Mapping Philosophical Disagreement: A Question–Position–Thinker–Tradition Framework for Comparative Philosophy and Knowledge Organization

Philosophical knowledge is commonly organized by branches, historical periods, influential thinkers, schools, and traditions. These approaches make extensive bodies of thought accessible, but they do not necessarily reveal where philosophical disagreements actually occur, what rival positions claim, which premises distinguish them, or whether seemingly similar debates across different intellectual traditions address the same question. This research paper develops QPTT-C, a question-centered framework for mapping philosophical disagreement through six distinct analytical objects: Question, Position, Thinker, Tradition, Source, and Consequence. Rather than treating philosophers, doctrines, schools, and philosophical problems as interchangeable classification units, the framework separates their functions and specifies the relationships through which philosophical claims can be compared, attributed, challenged, and reconstructed. The paper introduces DR-12, a twelve-field disagreement-recording schema. Its dimensions capture question identity, formulation, scope and presuppositions, position identity, propositional content, stance, argument and objection, thinker attribution, textual evidence, tradition context, comparability, and philosophical consequences. Eight principal relation types describe how records answer questions, attribute claims, establish contextual relationships, document evidence, express opposition, qualify positions, depend on premises, and imply consequences. An additional analogy relation supports comparisons that do not amount to direct philosophical disagreement. A central methodological contribution is the distinction between disagreement and apparent disagreement. Two philosophers may appear to contradict one another while using different definitions, addressing different problems, or accepting incompatible presuppositions. Conversely, thinkers separated by historical periods or intellectual traditions may engage with substantially comparable problems without sharing a single vocabulary. The framework therefore establishes four comparability grades—direct, partial, analogical, and withheld—and requires explicit justification before cross-tradition relationships are asserted. The method is developed in connection with the 131-question architecture of The Coordinates of Thought by Syed Raheel Shahzad and its digital reference counterpart, CoordinatesOfThought.com. The source architecture organizes its question cards across six domains: Metaphysics (24), Epistemology (18), Ethics and Axiology (21), Logic (16), Aesthetics (11), and Philosophy of X (41). These figures document the structure of the selected source architecture; they are not measurements of the completeness of world philosophy or the relative importance of its branches. The framework is demonstrated through five bounded philosophical comparisons: free will and determinism; the analysis of knowledge following Gettier; moral realism and moral language; the nature of aesthetic judgment; and the relationship between Confucian virtue discourse and Aristotelian virtue ethics. A separate negative-control example examines the risk of identifying Madhyamaka emptiness with Western nihilism merely because translated terminology suggests superficial similarity. The paper also develops a research-integrity approach to philosophical classification. It distinguishes directly verified primary-text evidence from scholarly reconstruction, contested interpretation, and unverified attribution. It treats missing evidence, uncertain translations, ambiguous concepts, and withheld comparisons as meaningful research outcomes rather than defects to conceal. The framework includes editorial rules, a proposed reliability protocol, testable propositions, and explicit conditions under which its classifications should be revised or rejected. The contribution is both philosophical and methodological. Philosophically, it argues that mapping disagreement requires attention to the logical structure of questions and answers rather than merely to the historical distribution of doctrines. Methodologically, it supplies a reproducible classification instrument intended for comparative philosophy, metaphilosophy, intellectual history, digital humanities, educational reference systems, and philosophical knowledge organization. The paper does not claim to resolve the disputes it examines, to have completed a full coding of all 131 questions, or to have established inter-coder reliability. Its case studies are analytical demonstrations, not empirical findings. Further research is proposed to test classification agreement, evaluate comparative interpretation, and investigate whether question-centered representations improve readers' understanding of philosophical arguments. Research materials and supplementary files The deposited research package includes the DR-12 codebook, a blank coding template, a machine-readable JSON validation schema, constructed illustrative records, a CSV index of all 131 source question headings, and a technical validation report. These materials are intended to permit independent examination, criticism, adaptation, and further testing of the framework. Publication record The Philosophy Mapping and Disagreement Series — Paper 1. Manuscript ID: PMD-QPTT-2026-01. Version: 1.0.0. Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23721230 Research manuscript: 30 pages, seven figures, fifteen numbered main tables, twenty references, and five appendices. Author: Syed Raheel Shahzad (سيد راحيل شهزاد). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7323-1577 Institutional and publishing affiliation: The Syed Group. Original book architecture: https://coordinatesofthought.com/book/the-coordinates-of-thought/ Digital philosophy reference: https://coordinatesofthought.com/map/ Author and research publications: https://syedraheelshahzad.com/research/ Author website: https://syedraheelshahzad.com/ This work is an independent scholarly preprint and has not undergone external peer review.