Substrate theory

The constellation's constitutional inquiry — what the irreducible semantics of the substrate are, and how new ones are identified, tested, and placed.

This is where the family reasons about itself as a whole: not the design of any one system (ontos, logos, thesmos, horos, stele, arche), but the question that sits above all of them — what shared semantics must exist for independently authored, future-unknown participants to become safely usable by each other? By the atlas membership test this is atlas's to hold: it concerns the whole constellation and has no single-repo owner. The decision to host it here is ADR 0012.

What this track is — and is not

This track is exploratory and pre-normative. It frames goals, derives criteria, and proposes candidates. It does not ship a spec. The three genres are kept apart on purpose, by where they live:

Genre	Lives in	Character
Exploratory inquiry — essays, derivations, open questions	theory/ (here)	living; superseded by ADR, not by edit-in-place once an idea settles
Settled decisions — "a theory is required when…", "capability is a candidate"	adr/	immutable once accepted; cross-cutting
Vocabulary — the terms the decisions use	glossary.md · concepts.json	the shared lexicon
A crystallized theory — normative spec, vocabulary, judgments, conformance vectors, tri-core impl	its own Greek-named repo	a substance system, registered in constellation.json

The lifecycle a concept travels:

theory/  (essay, open question)
  → adr/  (accepted cross-cutting decision: this is a theory / this is the test / this is the split)
    → a substance repo  (normative spec + tri-core impl + conformance vectors, once it has an owner)
      → constellation  (the integration gate exercises it, once it is part of the substrate set)

A new repo is created only when a candidate theory has crystallized into a substance system — a name, a spec, central judgments, conformance vectors. The discussion of whether it should exist stays here. This is the same promotion discipline the theory itself prescribes (0002 §4, 0004 §1), applied recursively to its own home.

The documents

• 0001 — the central goal and the admissible judgment The one goal the whole substrate serves, restated as a single checkable relation from which the theories follow as premises — rather than as a list of concerns.
• 0002 — what a theory is, and the two tests primitive / vocabulary / profile / theory; the required (challenge) test and the irreducible (definability) test; theories as a dependency DAG, not a flat basis.
• 0003 — the candidate theories authority and form as the settled base; capability and realization as the two leading candidates; artifact-vs-program; the open outsiders (resource, federation, time).
• 0004 — promotion, completeness, and governance the promotion path; why completeness is decidable only at the core and open at the periphery by design; the escape-clause test; where each kind of work lives.

House rules for this track

• One file per inquiry: NNNN-kebab-title.md, numbered in order.
• A doc here states a position and its open edges, not a ratified decision. When a position hardens, record it as an ADR and link back; leave the essay as the rationale.
• Cross-repo references are repo-qualified and linked (arche RFC 0001 → URL), per the adr/ rule — a bare number is always atlas-local.
• Keep the substrate narrow. The bias is to push a concept down the lifecycle (vocabulary before profile before theory before repo), never up, unless a test forces it.