Harald Zierhut

Strong cosmological evidence can support a model package without yet fixing what physical claim inside it is licensed. We ask a narrower question: where, in a published inferential pipeline, does the force of a component attribution enter, and where does it stop? We develop a contrast-indexed support-provenance audit that tracks minimally sufficient carrier-sets, their access status (direct or reconstructed), and the attributional ceiling of a claim ladder. In the Bullet Cluster, the lensing, X-ray, and galaxy configuration licenses a coarse claim: relative to independently constrained baryonic-source alternatives, an additional gravitationally effective contribution spatially separated from the dominant hot plasma is required. The focal pipeline does not by itself carry the stronger ontological claim that this contribution is dark matter in the entity/detection sense. In DESI Data Release 2, BAO–CMB–supernova combinations can license a rule- and contrast-relative preference for the w₀wₐ phenomenological model class while leaving the physical mechanism and microphysics open. A 2026 Lyα full-shape update provides an additional calibration: the Alcock–Paczynski output is validated at z_eff = 2.33, whereas the growth output was excluded from the final cosmological analysis after mock bias, showing that outputs within one pipeline can differ in evidential status. We distinguish contingent and unresolved attributional ceilings, state a source-backed criterion for potentially permanent ceilings, and identify bounded routes by which a ceiling can move. The result is not a new confirmation measure. It is a method for locating what a successful analysis supports, which inferential elements carry that support, and where stronger attribution requires new evidence.

Fundamental physics exhibits structural failure patterns that recur across otherwise unrelated domains. This paper synthesises a seven-signature pattern library — S1 Framework Incompleteness through S7 Self-Applicability Demand — and documents its firing record in a source-bound corpus of fourteen claims from published physics spanning cosmology, quantum mechanics, foundational proposals, and AI-assisted physics: six signatures with documented firings in the current baseline, while S4 remains to be adjudicated across the previously unassessed cases. The signatures are patterns, not verdicts: each is defined with an explicit trigger and non-trigger boundary, is related many-to-many to the programme’s applicability-condition types and transition grammar, and issues no claim-level assessment. On this basis the paper develops a necessity argument: the documented recurrence in the adjudicated corpus and the structural relatedness of the seven patterns through the licensing structure of physical description establish the need for a dedicated applicability-diagnostic function — necessary for making the claim-level licensing status of physical claims explicit and assessable, not sufficient for resolving the underlying physics. The programme’s condition-type analysis, transition grammar, and token-level verdict protocol constitute the current operative realisation of that function; four protocol runs on externally sourced cases provide an operational cross-check, kept strictly separate from the documentary corpus. The argument is defended against the central circularity objection in its strongest form: the signature categories derive from the structural analysis of licensing conditions, not from the instabilities they subsequently diagnose.

This paper develops a functional-logical grammar for transitions among three roles in physical explanation: applicability conditions, theoretical content, and empirical application. It treats transitions themselves as first-class objects of analysis and asks what additional warrant is required when support established in one role is carried into another. The framework distinguishes condition types, transition-specific profiles, and case-specific satisfaction; identifies nine ordered transition routes; and introduces the notions of bridge burden, bridge discharge, and residual bridge debt. A transition is adequately certified not by independence from theory or modelling assumptions, but by failure-sensitivity: there must be a route by which inadequacy of the warrant could be exposed. The framework is applied to four cases—Neptune, Vulcan, black-hole ringdown overtones, and thermometry—and then to decoherence and the quantum measurement problem. The analysis is diagnostic rather than verdict-generating: it localises what a stronger claim still owes, constrains the form an adequate repair must take, and also permits abstention where dependence is epistemically benign.

Recent work on holistic top-down confirmation has made precise why support for a model package need not transfer to its parts. A distinct downstream question remains: at what claim-resolution does a published inferential pipeline license attribution? We develop a contrast-indexed account of support provenance that identifies the highest claim-resolution carried by a documented analysis, tracking the empirical input, mediator, contrast class, decision rule, and premise carrying an inferential upgrade. Two cosmological cases yield complementary results. In the Bullet Cluster, a current dispute over dark-matter detection decomposes by claim resolution: relative to independently constrained baryonic-source alternatives, the spatial configuration licenses a coarse, functionally specified attribution—an additional gravitationally effective contribution spatially separated from the dominant hot plasma—while stronger property attributions remain open and the ontological attribution is not carried by the pipeline. In Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Data Release 2, joint constraints generate additional, rule- and contrast-relative support for a phenomenological model class without by themselves identifying a physically evolving dark-energy component. The comparison yields a non-uniform result: evidential strength and attributional resolution are distinct dimensions of evidential assessment, because stronger support at one rung need not carry a more specific physical attribution at the next.

On 5 December 2016, a preprint on the Galactic Centre gamma-ray excess announced at its citable surface that the point-like nature of the emission rules out the dark-matter interpretation of the excess ‘entirely’. We examine the relation between that surface and the argument beneath it through a premise-level reconstruction, a checksummed comparison of all four arXiv versions, and a coded audit of a frozen ADS–INSPIRE citing corpus. Three findings emerge. First, from v1 alone, the argument licenses a conditional, class-relative, plausibility-graded conclusion, while the surface verdict exceeds that licence through three document-internal operations; this establishes a document-level gap, not freedom from retrospective premise selection. Second, two substantive revisions qualify load-bearing supports while the abstract’s categorical exclusion predicate and totality adverb persist. Third, ten of twenty-seven indexed contexts render Clark’s scope: eight narrowly, one in explicit contradiction, and one broadly in a doctoral dissertation; the remaining seventeen do not render Clark-specific scope. We call this selective scope rendering: a corpus pattern in which scope-bearing citations predominantly restrict or oppose the surface verdict, while non-rendering citations are not counted as containment. In this indexed case the pattern is descriptive and does not establish filtering beyond ordinary citation practice. We attribute no intentions and infer no causal path to the field’s later self-description.

Interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree persistently, yet no shared standard exists for judging which interpretive claims meet the structural preconditions of physical description and which remain incomplete. We introduce a claim-level diagnostic protocol of six applicability conditions (A1–A6) that classifies interpretive statements without adjudicating their truth. Each claim receives a standardised verdict—PASS*, OPEN, Limit of Applicability (LoA), or TYPE-SHIFT—and, for every deficit, a directive stating what the claim would need to address. We apply the protocol to six major interpretations: Copenhagen, Many Worlds, QBism, Objective Collapse, Bohmian Mechanics, and Relational Quantum Mechanics. Three results follow. First, none earns an unrestricted PASS* across all six conditions: on the protocol’s terms the measurement problem is open, not merely contested. Second, the deficits fall into systematic trade-offs among formal consistency, posit cost, and empirical accessibility—no interpretation optimises all three. Third, and most consequentially, the protocol reaches the limit of its own presuppositions on QBism, returning a TYPE-SHIFT verdict: the open question is whether a position of that kind makes a physical claim at all, or instead applies physical formalism within a rationality-theoretic framework.

This deposit contains the pre-registered methodology, a pre-B3 reliability amendment, and the complete uncoded extraction register for I5, an empirical investigation of asymmetric normalisation of unresolved liabilities in cosmology literature. I5 forms one component (the Epistemic Incumbency axis) of the planned paper P12 on Frame-Boundary, Structural Solvency, and Epistemic Incumbency in the dark sector. The methodology was frozen on 26 May 2026, prior to data extraction. Phase B2 full-text extraction is complete (20 sources, 100 selected passages); Phase B3 coding has not begun. The purpose of Version 1.0 is to time-stamp the complete uncoded extraction register and the reliability amendment before any code, valence, or Burden-Asymmetry Score is assigned, so that the coding cannot later be suspected of having been reverse-engineered from a desired result. The package includes: (A) the I5 Coding Protocol v3; (B) Source-Lock Final v1.3; (C) Phase B1 v1.2 Candidate Register; (D) Phase B2 Access Check; (E) the complete uncoded B2 extraction register for all 20 sources; and (F) the B3/BAS Amendment v1.1 specifying blind double-coding, status-effect valence rules, pre-coding calibration, and adjudication-before-BAS sequencing. No findings, no Burden-Asymmetry Score, and no Gate verdict are reported. This is Version 1.0 of a planned iterative deposition; Version 2.0 will add the B3 coding, the BAS calculation, and the Gate verdict after coding is complete.

Two Symptoms, One Failure examines whether dark matter and dark energy should be understood as two independent discoveries or as coupled symptoms of a single modelling overextension. The book applies an applicability-diagnostic framework to the standard cosmological use of the FLRW background and argues that dark-sector inferences depend on regime-specific assumptions whose licensing status remains open. It reconstructs the dark sector as a possible artefact of applying a homogeneous cosmological framework beyond its warranted range, with particular attention to backreaction, inhomogeneity, and the methodological status of cosmological inference.

Prephysics develops a diagnostic framework for the conditions under which physical descriptions are applicable. It argues that before a physical theory or model can license claims about the world, the regime-specific conditions of its applicability must be made explicit and assessed. The book introduces a structured protocol for identifying applicability failures, distinguishing formal coherence from physical applicability, and clarifying the methodological status of physical explanation at its boundaries.

This paper identifies a cross-domain recurrence of the same structural failure patterns in cosmological origin proposals, quantum-mechanical interpretations, and foundational finality claims. The pathology is the same in each case: physical claims presuppose framework-constitutive conditions — licensing conditions — that they neither declare nor classify, and the resulting problems are not resolvable by the tools the claims themselves provide. Two structural limits explain why these patterns persist. First, a Structural Boundary Result establishes that no physical theory can fully derive its own licensing conditions: every self-licensing attempt terminates in postulate, circle, or frame-exit. Second, the major assessment frameworks in philosophy of science (Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan, Dawid) operate at theory-level and do not provide claim-level diagnostics with regime-binding, auditable verdicts, or reformulation directives. From these two limits, a necessity argument follows: a methodological layer that makes licensing conditions explicit, classifiable, and auditable is structurally required. The paper specifies this layer — applicability diagnostics — as methodological infrastructure analogous to metrology. A six-step diagnostic procedure is defined and demonstrated on a worked example (Hartle–Hawking no-boundary proposal), producing a determinate verdict, a trigger report, and a reformulation directive. A fourteen-case Master Table applies seven diagnostic signatures (S1–S7) across cosmology, quantum mechanics, and foundational physics. The constraints identified are necessary, not sufficient: they define a diagnostic threshold, not a success criterion.

Ten papers spanning cosmology, quantum foundations, and the philosophy of foundational physics have produced a programme-internal convergence claim: persistent boundary problems in these domains arise not from empirical gaps but from undisclosed licensing conditions that cannot be resolved within the physical theories that presuppose them. We treat this as a working conclusion, made auditable by explicit cross-paper mapping (Table 1) and the published audit trails in Papers 1–10. We show that this finding, combined with two independently established results—that no physical theory can derive its own licensing conditions (the Structural Boundary Result) and that existing philosophical methodologies do not provide claim-level diagnostics with regime-binding and auditable verdicts (the Framework Gap)—yields a disjunctive conclusion: the systematic investigation of licensing conditions constitutes a distinct research mode. We call this mode prephysics. Prephysics is not metaphysics, not philosophy of science in the classical sense, and not anti-physical: it is the operationalised, regime-bound, reflexively consistent investigation of the conditions under which physical claims are licensed. We distinguish prephysics from five neighbouring disciplines, specify four quality criteria, identify three classes of structurally forced research questions, and argue that the recognition of this research mode transforms persistent foundational disputes into diagnosable licensing questions. Prephysics does not replace physics; it clarifies the conditions under which physical description is licensed. Keywords: prephysics, applicability conditions, licensing conditions, diagnostic protocol, philosophy of physics, structural boundary, foundational methodology, levels of description.

The standard cosmological model (GR+ΛCDM) enjoys remarkable empirical success. Yet a systematic question has received little attention in the philosophical and foundational literature: are the applicability conditions for deploying general relativity at cosmological scales actually satisfied? This paper develops and applies an operationalised validation-licensing protocol to answer that question. The protocol evaluates six applicability conditions (A1–A6), identifies diagnostic signatures, and produces a reproducible verdict—PASS, OPEN, or Limit of Applicability—together with an explicit audit trail. Three principal results emerge. First, a regime-dependent applicability profile shows that GR transitions from PASS in the solar-system regime (R1) to OPEN in the cosmological regime (R3), with the transition correlating with the onset of gravitational anomalies near the MOND acceleration scale a₀. Second, a constraint-disclosure inventory identifies twelve typically undeclared modelling choices that constitutively carry the empirical fit of ΛCDM, demonstrating that this success is a configuration achievement rather than a model-independent result. Third, a diagnostic inheritance structure shows that standard necessity claims for dark matter and dark energy inherit the OPEN status of the GR-applicability presupposition on which they depend. The paper concludes with reformulation directives specifying what observational evidence would convert the diagnostic status from OPEN to PASS, and demonstrates that the protocol is diagnostic and model-neutral: it does not advocate modified gravity, does not propose an alternative cosmology, and does not predict observational outcomes. Additional Description: Preprint. Submitted to Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Virtual Special Issue ‘Modeling the Cosmos: Frontiers in Philosophy of Astrophysics and Cosmology’ (Guest Editors: Silvia De Bianchi, Marco Forgione, Federico Viglione). Part of the research programme ‘Applicability Diagnostics in Fundamental Physics’ (Zierhut & Schwarz).

Physical theories operate only if their claims can be about determinate targets, range beyond isolated tokens, impose non-trivial rule-governed structure on assignments, relations, transitions, or their weights, and—where change is described—distinguish ordered configurations. An earlier version of this analysis expressed that idea as a seven-level emergence path and projected it into six applicability conditions. This paper replaces that linear architecture with a goal-relative functional analysis. It separates four questions that the earlier account ran together: which functions are necessary, whether the inventory is complete, which functions depend on which others, and how structural preconditions become assessable claim-level conditions. Relative to world-directed physical representation (G1), cross-instance systematic physical description (G2), and description of physical change (G3), four functions survive adversarial removal tests: discernibility of claim-relevant determinations, re-identifiability across applications, rule-governed constraint structure, and ordering capacity. Their dependency structure is partial rather than linear. We then justify six claim-level applicability conditions—Addressability, Interface Control, Stability, Traceability, Carrier Adequacy, and Constraint Disclosure—as operational projections through two-component warrants that combine a structural input with an assessability requirement. The resulting account keeps type-level conditions, transition analysis, and token-level verdicts distinct. Finally, a typed self-licensing argument shows, conditional on explicit licensing-coverage and typed same-kind premises, why a framework claiming complete internal derivation of all its non-trivial applicability-licensing conditions must encounter remainder, cycle, frame-exit, or non-termination. The account is explicitly defeasible: completeness is challenge-tested rather than asserted, and no claim is made that the identified functions are ontologically fundamental.

Probabilistic objects that are formally admissible—coherent within standard measure-theoretic or Bayesian frameworks—are routinely treated as physically applicable by default. This paper introduces a claim-level diagnostic protocol that distinguishes formal well-definedness from physical applicability. The protocol evaluates individual probabilistic claims against six explicit applicability conditions (addressability, interface control, stability under admissible variations, traceability, carrier adequacy, and constraint disclosure) and produces three structured outputs: a verdict (PASS / OPEN / Loss of Applicability), a trigger report identifying which conditions are responsible, and an action-guiding reformulation directive. A central contribution is the articulation of OPEN as a positive epistemic status: it marks claim-level non-closure with explicit specification of what is missing, blocking interpretive drift while preserving a controlled path toward closure. Two worked examples—a multiverse typicality claim (verdict: LoA) and a Born-rule claim under decoherence (verdict: OPEN)—demonstrate the protocol’s discriminating behaviour. A micro-case library spanning cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum foundations, and climate/simulation science confirms domain-generality. The protocol is offered as a lightweight methodological tool that increases the epistemic quality of probabilistic claims by making their applicability conditions explicit, auditable, and comparable across domains.