Constitution before Adjudication

Description Constitution Before Adjudication: Identity, Recurrence and the Logical Conditions of Rights-Bearing Objects is a communication paper and argument object within the Constitutional Physics programme. The paper develops the proposition that constitution precedes adjudication: before a scientific, computational or legal system can meaningfully determine what is true of an object, the object must first be sufficiently constituted and represented to bear the predicate being adjudicated. The argument distinguishes constitution from definition and proposes that identifiable traits need not originate as predefined categories. They may emerge through recurrent patterns of distinguishishable displacement across observations, permitting a progression from observation to distinction, recurrence, trait, identity, constitutional standing and, only subsequently, adjudication. From this follows the provisional concept of a right to be constitutable and represented. This is not proposed as an existing substantive legal right, but as a meta-constitutional principle intended to prevent deficiencies in a representational or classificatory system from being mistaken for evidence of the non-existence or inadmissibility of an object that the system cannot adequately constitute. The paper simultaneously establishes a limitation on that principle: constitution is not equated with reality. The possibility of remaining unconstituted is preserved. Constitution permits meaningful adjudication within a given ontological context, including a warranted finding of absence; non-constitution permits neither a positive finding nor a claim of absence. Failure of constitution is therefore treated as an epistemic and communicative limit rather than an ontological verdict. The argument is extended to scientific representation, personal identity, jurisprudence, artificial intelligence and computational governance, and introduces the possibility of a linguistic metalaw governing the conditions under which independently constituted representations acquire communicable consequence without requiring a universal ontology. The work is intended as an accessible entry into the logic of Constitutional Physics rather than as a conventional literature-review or journal article. It also identifies an associated experimental programme, in preparation at the date of publication, concerned with whether meaning, provenance, attribution and transformation history can remain independently recoverable across controlled human and computational exchanges. No experimental result is claimed in this publication. Author: Stefaan VossenProgramme: Constitutional Physics · Dot TheoryVersion: 1.0Publication date: 8 August 2026DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21726805Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0