Forbidden Trajectories as an Operational Realisation of Sorkin's Principle: A Social Measure in the Programme of Diagnostic Sociology

This article argues that the concept of forbidden trajectories (SNₜotal) in Timofeev (https: //doi. org/10. 5281/zenodo. 19558840) can be interpreted as an operational analogue of Sorkin's quantum measure for non-physical contextual systems. The multiplicative structure of SNₜotal — defined as the joint action of communicative, hybrid, and hegemonic constraints — captures the key functional roles of quantum measure theory: the generation of a constrained space of admissible histories, the assignment of non-classical weights to potential configurations, and the structuring of interference between competing trajectories. Interference is not encoded in the multiplicative form itself but emerges through deviations between observed and classically predicted measures of unions. These deviations can be evaluated empirically using CHSH-type inequalities applied to Q-methodological data. The article contributes by making explicit a principle previously implicit in the diagnostic sociology programme, thereby strengthening its Lakatosian status, and by formulating a set of falsifiable empirical predictions.