Stefan Rapp

Finite cognitive systems organize experience, stabilize reference, and guide expectations and action without fully surveying their presuppositions and consequences. Stabilized orders support orientation but can be overextended or continued inappropriately. This paper develops a programmatic diagnostic and decision architecture for managing such orders, particularly their elaborated forms as models. Examining the claim architecture connects units of reference, claims, domains, scope, test conditions, and couplings. Validity is understood as domain-bound viability under strain; friction denotes an epistemically readable mismatch of an activated stabilized order under its operating conditions. The architecture separates assessments of validity from decisions about continued use. Rules for opening, redistribution, and abandonment structure exploration, attribution of findings, and the justification of correction, revision, suspension, replacement, or abandonment. The social conditions for testing in distributed epistemic and model management are also considered. A boundary case of personal identity examined through epistemic critique and an internal, LLM-assisted comparison involving the Allegheny Family Screening Tool challenge different parts of the program. The comparison with a strong disciplinary baseline establishes no general superiority. LLM judges rated certain additional contributions concerning claim specification, model identity, transfer of findings, and justification of revision as substantive. Their soundness by disciplinary standards, generalizability, and practical utility have not been independently confirmed. The architecture is not a decision algorithm and replaces neither disciplinary procedures nor normative justification. Its supplementary aim is to make the testing, use, and revision of stabilized orders and models more controllable and correctable across everyday, scientific, technical, and institutional contexts of cognition.

This paper examines shared epistemic reality as a stabilized elaboration of the intersubjective domain. The preceding paper on the intersubjective domain showed that subjective orientation stands under the conditions of other orientations and enters an intersubjective space of connection through communicability, reception by others, shared connectability, and correction. The present paper presupposes this structure and asks how more durable shared spaces of reference, expectation, and correction arise from it. Shared reality is understood neither as mere consensus nor as immediate access to a fully determinable external world, but as a correctable form of shared orientation under finite conditions. What matters is not that several subjects possess identical inner worlds, but that they can stabilize references, meanings, expectations, and procedures in such a way that these remain capable of being taken up again, expected, corrected, and tested. The paper reconstructs this movement from the limit of local stabilization through shared reference, expectation spaces, trust, and institutionalization to intersubjective validity, science, friction, and revision. Local stabilization designates a perspective-bound order that provides orientation to an individual cognitive system but is not yet sustained as a shared reference or expectation space. Within the research context of Epistemic Reality, the paper determines the stabilized intersubjective middle between subjective orientation and functional-empirical testing. Science appears as a special case of shared reality under strain, in which intersubjective stabilization is systematically coupled to measurement, repetition, methodological control, and organized revision. Finally, the paper shows that shared epistemic reality remains viable only if friction remains readable as an indication of a need for correction and if shared orders are kept capable of revision.

This paper examines the intersubjective domain within the project of Epistemic Reality. It asks how subjective orientation becomes co-conditioned by the orientations of others without this already implying consensus, recognition, or shared reality. The central concept is intersubjective conditionality: subjects stand under expectations, references, rules, interpretations, and forms of correction that they must take into account even when they do not accept them. The paper reconstructs intersubjectivity through communicability, take-up, shared connectability, and correction. Intersubjectivity does not begin with identical inner worlds or with successful understanding, but with the possibility that a reference can be taken up, answered, contested, shifted, or corrected by others. In this sense, intersubjective order is subjectively reconstructible for individual subjects, but not subjectively freely available. The argument distinguishes the intersubjective domain from merely subjective orientation, social consensus, normative recognition, social stability, and functional-empirical robustness. Its specific contribution is to show how orientations, experiences, and references become jointly workable among several cognitive systems without reducing intersubjective validity to agreement or social stability. Intersubjective order arises not from consensus, but from ongoing, correctable connectability under conditions of difference. The paper thereby provides an epistemic-architectural foundation for later analyses of shared epistemic reality, shared reference spaces, trust, institutionalization, and science. It is not intended as a complete social philosophy or a theory of normative legitimacy, but as a basic account of the conditions under which subjective orientations can enter shared, corrigible, and robust spaces of connection.

This paper develops a cognition-relative account of realism by reconsidering the opposition between realism and solipsism. Classical realism usually presupposes that one can meaningfully speak of a relation between consciousness and an external world, while solipsism emphasizes the inescapability of one’s own experience. The paper argues that this opposition already presupposes too much: not only the assertion of an external world, but the very concept of an “outside” gives positive form to what lies beyond the limit of positive determinability. The central thesis is that the so-called outside is not a positively determinable domain standing independently over against a cognitive system, but a stabilized interpretation of the limit of positive determinability as a counter-domain. This does not entail dogmatic solipsism. Rather, it leads to a cognition-relative realism: realism is real in the sense that it stabilizes the form in which reality can acquire meaning, resistance, corrigibility, and orientational force within a cognitive system. The paper distinguishes this position from naïve realism, metaphysical realism, and flat anti-realism, while also situating it in relation to Kant, Husserl, Sellars, Carnap, Putnam’s internal realism, van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, Goodman, Luhmann, and Wittgenstein. Scientific realism is not rejected, but reinterpreted as a functional-empirical form of stabilized reality rather than as access to a world-in-itself. The result is a realism without a metaphysical outside: reality can be stable, binding, and orientationally effective without being positively determined as a world-in-itself.

Finite systems do not operate under complete information, unlimited processing capacity, or stably pre-given decision spaces. They face open possibility spaces in which several continuations are conceivable, without any one of them being fully determined, probabilistically calculable, or formally derivable. This paper develops the concept of contingency mechanics for this situation: the dynamic operational logic through which finite systems transform open possibility into viable continuation. The guiding idea is simple: finite systems must not only choose among possible continuations; they must also stabilize one of them strongly enough to act, think, model, coordinate, or revise, without closing the field of possibility too early. Contingency mechanics therefore describes how possible continuations emerge, how they are compared, how one of them becomes provisionally stable, how successful stabilizations recede into the background, and how they can later become problematic again under changed conditions. The core of the model is: variation → e-profile → e₀-proximate stabilization → immanentization → latent e → actualization → friction/reorganization. e-profiles designate the system-relative stabilization tensions of an order. These tensions include the effort required to generate, maintain, integrate, defend, revise, or reorganize an order. e₀ designates the range in which ordering gain, stabilization costs, revisability, and processing form enter into a viable relation. The paper distinguishes generative, selective, latent, and actualized e and thereby describes stabilization as a life-cycle phenomenon: an order emerges, competes with alternatives, recedes into the background, and can later become processable again through focus, context, or friction. Contingency mechanics is not an ontology of the world in itself. Its claim to generality rests on the fact that every world accessible to a finite system appears as a reconstructed and stabilized order. Within such orders, e is quasi-real: not as a world-absolute substance, but as real stabilization tension within the operative order of a finite system. The paper demonstrates the four states of e through a historically oriented model shift, distinguishes contingency mechanics from Active Inference, free-energy approaches, and Peirce’s abduction, identifies conditions of falsification, and sketches a path of operationalization for LLM systems.

Epistemics understands epistemic practice as model management under finite conditions (Rapp 2026a). This determination remains incomplete, however, as long as it remains unclear how fields of experience become model-capable, that is, available for model formation, in the first place. Models do not arise directly from experience; rather, they presuppose that experience has already been ordered, differentiated, and epistemically stabilized. The present paper examines this prior level of stabilization and determines models as explicitly identifiable, workable, and revisable stabilizations of epistemically ordered fields of experience. The central thesis is this: epistemic stabilization does not simply reduce uncertainty; it often first makes it localizable. As long as a field of experience remains diffuse, it also remains unclear what precisely its uncertainty consists in. Only when an epistemic system posits a provisional order, such as a heuristic, a schema, a case hypothesis, or a model, does it become apparent which relations hold, which information is missing, which assumptions are too strong, and where fault lines arise. This provisional stabilization is therefore not merely a preliminary stage of secured knowledge, but an epistemic act of testing. From this perspective, central concepts of Epistemics are made more precise. Validity designates the carrying capacity of a stabilization under finite conditions. Friction is the point at which its boundary becomes visible. Revision is the restructuring of a stabilization when this boundary becomes epistemically relevant. At the same time, the paper shows that degrees of stabilization, from heuristic through schema and model to formalization, do not form a ladder of progress. Stronger stabilization is not automatically better inquiry; what is decisive is the adequacy of the stabilization in relation to the state of information, purpose, domain of validity, costs, and revisability. The paper supplements Epistemics by systematically opening up the area before the explicit model. Model management does not begin only with completed models, but wherever an epistemic system stabilizes a field of experience in such a way that it can become visible what holds, what is missing, and what does not fit.

Models are often treated as though they were generally valid or readily transferable to other contexts. This leads to misapplications, apparent contradictions, and forms of model overextension. By contrast, this paper develops a domain-based perspective within Epistemics as model management under finite conditions. Domains are not presupposed as given regions but are understood as functionally reconstructed spaces of order with their own functional logic, their own conditions of stability, and their own criteria of validity. Against this background, the paper investigates how models encounter stability problems at domain boundaries, under what conditions they can be transferred between domains, and why such transfers require adaptation. Transition functions are thereby determined as conditions of functional connectivity. Model migration accordingly appears as a process of transformation, and model overextension as a boundary violation. Moreover, the paper shows that the viability of a model depends not only on its internal structure but also on its domain coupling. A model can be stable within one domain and simultaneously fragile across domains. Falsification therefore appears not only as an intra-domain test of a model but also as an indication of transition problems, unstable domain couplings, or insufficiently specified domain boundaries. The theoretical contribution of the paper lies in an integrated architecture of domain-relative model validity. Domains, boundaries, transition functions, model migration, model overextension, domain coupling, and falsification are related to one another within a common framework. In this way, model validity becomes determinable not as general or universal, but as domain-relative, boundary-dependent, and transition-bound.

The paper thus shows that scientific rationality under finite conditions consists not only in stabilization, critique, and exploration, but equally in the controlled capacity to transform existing model orders. It begins from the observation that scientific rationality cannot be adequately described if one considers only stabilization, falsification, search, or complete model replacement. Between the provisional retention of a model and its complete replacement lies a field of regulated transformations, which the present contribution conceptualizes and systematizes as revision. Revision denotes the rule-governed transformation of a model or model nexus under conditions of rising friction, declining validity, increasing costs, or intensifying domain conflicts. The paper clarifies the structural position of revision within Epistemics and distinguishes it from adjacent operations such as falsification, search, and mere stabilization. On that basis, it develops a typology of local, structural, domain-related, and global revision. It also identifies typical triggers of revision, formulates criteria of rational revision, and analyzes central pathologies, including omitted, delayed, cosmetic, and disproportional revision, as well as ontologization that blocks revision. The central thesis is that revision constitutes the mediating transformative operation between friction, falsification, and search. Friction signals strain, falsification marks loss of validity, search opens the space of possible alternatives, and revision organizes the actual transformation of the model. The paper thus shows that scientific rationality under finite conditions consists not only in stabilization, critique, and exploration, but equally in the controlled capacity to transition existing model orders.

Modern cosmology is marked by persistent tensions among different measurement methods, ranges of scale, and cosmological epochs. These tensions are often treated as local inconsistencies within a fundamentally unified theoretical framework. This paper proposes a different methodological reading: persistent tensions, provided they are stably reproducible and arise at transitions between modeling regimes, may indicate an overextension of the cosmological claim to unity. This paper is not offered as a physical alternative to modern cosmology, but as a philosophy-of-science case analysis of domain-bound model validity. It argues that cosmological practice already operates with different modeling regimes at the operational level, but that this domain dependence is not always consistently translated into an explicit theory of validity, domain boundaries, transition rules, and the level at which falsification applies. Cosmological tensions are thereby not relativized, but made legible at a different level: as possible indications that not only parameters or auxiliary assumptions, but model-domain assignments themselves may become subject to assessment. What is proposed is therefore not the abandonment of scientific unity, but its reorganization as second-order unity. Unity then no longer resides exclusively in a single model that is supposed to bear all cosmological domains directly, but in explicit rules of domain assignment, controlled transitions, overlapping testing zones, and shared consistency conditions. The level of falsification thereby shifts: not only individual parameters are at stake, but also the question of whether a model is still appropriately assigned to a particular domain. The paper therefore decides no physical hypothesis, but develops a methodological architecture in which model plurality and scientific unity are related to one another in a controlled way.

Scientific and technical search processes unfold under finite conditions. Limited resources, alongside growing model complexity, generate structural tensions between stability consolidation and exploratory opening. Although this tension field has been described across disciplines, a generic architecture is often missing that can structure the dynamic reweighting between consolidation and exploration by means of explicit efficiency indicators. The operative vocabulary used in this paper is canon-compatible, derived from Epistemik as an epistemic infrastructure as well as from the concept of friction as a boundary signal of finite capacity developed therein. This is not an independent theory, but rather an architectural extraction and continuation of these structural concepts. The specific contribution lies in elaborating a Dual-Mode Architecture of model management that describes search processes as dynamic configurations of stabilized transition types and formulates a relational dominance logic: In real search systems, transitions between consolidation and exploration typically occur as gradual shifts of relative mode dominance in resource allocation. Validity is understood as robustness under disturbance, costs as required process tension. Friction functions as a diagnostic indicator of a declining ratio of robustness gain to effort. Increasing friction density, robustness plateaus, and nonlinear tension dynamics mark threshold consolidations at which a priority reweighting in favor of exploratory transition types becomes structurally plausible. The architecture is intended as a generic instrument for increasing structural search efficiency under finite conditions. It neither replaces domain-specific theories nor offers truth guarantees, but makes the control logic of model spaces explicitly formulable and thereby describable as an operative prerequisite for adaptive model development.

The classical distinction between physics and metaphysics has become increasingly inadequate for describing contemporary epistemic practice. While empirical physics is often implicitly treated as the sole standard of the real, subjective experience and social order are either reduced or relegated to an indeterminate metaphysical remainder. This paper proposes an alternative epistemic ordering. Starting from Epistemics as a prior clarification framework, reality is not understood as a unified domain of objects, but as a configuration of distinct physics of stability: a subjective physics of experience, an intersubjective physics of social order, and a functional-empirical physics of effective constraints. These physics are neither ontological domains nor hierarchically ordered; they differ by their mechanisms of stabilization, load-bearing limits, and characteristic boundary signals. Central to this ordering is the distinction between validity and stability. Epistemics clarifies in which physics a reality claim can be meaningfully raised and tested, that is, its physics of validity. Only within such a validity-physics can stability, robustness, and failure be determined. In this context, friction is analyzed as an epistemically legible boundary signal that makes limited load-bearing capacity visible without constituting an ontological principle. Friction also functions as a selection mechanism over time. Different stabilization patterns generate different costs under strain, which stabilizes some structures while others are abandoned. In this way, core functions traditionally assigned to metaphysics can be fulfilled with greater epistemic precision, without formulating ultimate ontological claims. The focus shifts from whether something is real to the question under which validity conditions and stability limits reality claims can be meaningfully tested.

This paper develops the concept of friction as an epistemic diagnostic category for stability under finite conditions. Friction is not treated as mere disturbance, resistance, error, anomaly, falsification, or revision. Rather, it is defined as the epistemically legible non-fitting of an activated expectation or model structure under conditions of enactment. Friction becomes relevant where a pattern of stabilization no longer carries fittingly under strain and thereby makes boundaries, costs, mis-couplings, or the need for transformation visible. The paper distinguishes subjective, intersubjective, and functional-empirical domains as analytical axes for reading different forms of friction. It argues that friction functions as a boundary signal of finite load-bearing capacity: it shows where models, routines, institutions, technical systems, or scientific theories remain viable under load, where their costs increase disproportionately, and where revision, limitation, recoupling, or transformation becomes necessary. On this basis, the paper develops a typology of subjective, intersubjective, functional-empirical, and cross-domain friction. Special attention is given to scientific model formation, physical boundary concepts, mathematical indeterminacy, bureaucracy, technology, law, and artificial intelligence. The paper argues that many systems do not eliminate friction, but displace, conceal, or redistribute it. Against both naive realism and naive relativism, friction is presented as an intermediate diagnostic concept: it makes the costs and limits of model validity visible before a model is prematurely rejected as false or dogmatically stabilized despite rising costs. The paper concludes by introducing friction competence as a design and diagnostic principle for keeping friction legible, attributable, and handleable under conditions of finite stabilization.

This paper reconstructs ontologization not as a metaphysical claim about what exists, but as a fundamental epistemic operation. Ontologization is understood as a form of functional stabilization through which finite cognitive systems transform a dynamic field of experience into identifiable, re-accessible, and referentially available units of reference. In this sense, ontologization is a cross-domain achievement of cognition under finite conditions: it is not confined to one domain, although its concrete conditions of stability, validity, and revision are domain-specific. The paper argues that ontologization does not produce truth about an independent reality. Rather, it produces the stable forms of reference within which perception, memory, expectation, action, and later truth claims first become possible. The analysis traces this operation from individual cognition to intersubjective stabilization. The transition from individual to intersubjective ontologization is reconstructed through joint attention and shared reference, with declarative pointing treated as a paradigmatic marker at which this threshold becomes especially visible. Language is then analyzed as a secondary but powerful layer of fixation. It does not generate minimal ontologization from nothing, but condenses and extends already possible structures of reference, preserves them across situations, and changes their conditions of revision. Against this background, the paper defines the malfunction of ontologization as absolutization: the point at which functional posits are misunderstood as final descriptions of reality. Ontologization thus appears as a necessary condition of cognition, a constitutive operation of shared epistemic reality, and a structural source of epistemic entrenchment.

This paper introduces Epistemics as a system for managing models and model formation under finite conditions. Epistemics is understood neither as metaphysics nor as a normative theory, and it does not replace any existing discipline. Its subject matter is the explicit analysis of the conditions, costs, stabilization, and revision of processes of model formation and knowledge production. The focus is not on grounding truth, but on clarifying validity, domains, and transitions. Starting from the structural finitude of knowledge, the paper describes stabilization, model formation, costs, and friction as central operational elements. Friction functions as a boundary and diagnostic signal that makes overextension, domain confusion, or blocked revision visible. Epistemic problems thus appear less as errors of individual actors than as systemic malfunctions of epistemic structures resulting from silent shifts in validity and cost-blindness. The paper explicitly distinguishes between subjective, intersubjective, and functional-empirical domains and shows that many conflicts arise from silent shifts of validity between these ordering spaces. Epistemics does not relativize empirical science; rather, it protects it from ontologization and overload by specifying its scope. A canonical conceptual apparatus is introduced as a starting point for further work. This canon is deliberately stabilized, yet revisable. Conceptual shifts are not carried out implicitly but documented explicitly. Epistemics thus understands itself as a tool for diagnosing epistemic malfunctions and enabling revision-capable stability, not as a final worldview.

This article examines whether ontological materialism can ground exclusive personal identity over time if it retains the claim that precisely this experiencing subject continues to exist. The argument starts from the distinction between qualitative identity and numerical sameness and treats the exclusivity claim not as a defended metaphysical truth, but as a test premise. If the self is fully determined by material-functional facts, and if such structures are in principle duplicable, then qualitative, psychological, and functional continuation can be realized more than once. Copying and fission scenarios therefore generate a parity problem: several continuations may satisfy all relevant criteria without determining which one is exclusively numerically identical with the presently experiencing subject. The article does not reject methodological materialism or materialist theories of personal identity as such. Rather, it clarifies the limits of a stronger ontological claim: that the self, understood as an exclusively identical experiencing subject, can be fully derived from material-functional facts alone. The analysis also examines bearer continuity, metabolism, animalism, Parfitian reductionism, perdurantism, and functional or information-theoretic models. It argues that causal-organismic continuity remains the strongest materialist response, but that it either provides a genealogical rule of continuation or depends, in sharpened parity cases, on a fact of continuation that is no longer epistemically accessible. If exclusivity is retained, it must therefore be revised, determined genealogical-organismically, accepted as an epistemically inaccessible fact of continuation, supplemented by a non-qualitative principle, or treated as indeterminate.

Contemporary debates in philosophy, science, media studies, and technology are increasingly shaped by conflicts over what counts as real. These conflicts are frequently framed as contests between realism and relativism, objectivity and construction, facts and narratives. This paper argues that such oppositions conceal a more fundamental problem: the absence of a coherent framework for distinguishing modes and degrees of reality. Relative Reality Theory (RRT) develops a systematic account of reality as a graded and mode-specific status rather than as an absolute property. Reality is understood as a function of experiential immediacy, intersubjective stability, and functional efficacy. On this basis, RRT reconstructs distinct modes of reality, subjective, intersubjective, and functional reality, without dissolving them into a unified ontological hierarchy or reducing them to mere opinions. RRT provides a conceptual framework for analyzing real-world phenomena such as scientific models, media realities, political narratives, simulations, and virtual environments. By clarifying the conditions under which something can count as real in a given sense, the theory avoids both ontological absolutism and arbitrary relativism. It provides tools for identifying category mistakes, resolving apparent conflicts of reality, and understanding why certain realities remain stable despite contestation. The paper positions RRT as a philosophical ordering framework rather than as an operative or technical theory of model management. Its aim is not to calculate or optimize reality claims, but to clarify their modes, scope, limits, and conditions of validity. In doing so, RRT contributes to contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science by providing a precise vocabulary for navigating reality under conditions of pluralism, mediality, and systemic complexity.

The classical and widely received Popperian theory of falsification operates with an idealized binary picture of scientific rationality, according to which a theory is in principle undermined by a conflicting observation (Popper [1934] 1959). Even though Popper himself acknowledges methodological side conditions, this binary-eliminative structure remains too coarse for analyzing modern modeling practice. Models such as Newtonian mechanics, classical thermodynamics, or contemporary climate models are empirically limited in certain subdomains yet remain epistemically indispensable in others. This paper develops an integrative framework of model validity as a philosophy-of-science specialization of model management under finite conditions. It combines insights from Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, da Costa/French, and contemporary model theory; distinguishes global from contextual falsification; and introduces the epistemic enabling space E(t). E(t) renders explicit the methodological, technical, and institutional conditions under which models can be formulated, tested, stabilized, and replaced by alternatives. "Falsification" is understood here not as a purely logical criterion of truth or falsity but as a rational-pragmatic mechanism of model evaluation. The decisive issue is not merely whether a model's performance declines in a given domain, but whether available alternatives within the same relevant domain prove stably more epistemically competitive over time. The proposed reconstructive evaluative structure links approximate truth, explanatory power, and model costs without treating scientific rationality as generally algorithmically computable. A case study of climate models illustrates how ensemble methods, parameterizations, and probabilistic weighting procedures contribute to domain refinement. The theory thereby reconstructs central structures of modern modeling practice and explains why models remain stable despite partial falsifications, when they are revised, and under which conditions global model replacement occurs.