Dimensional Dis–Integration: A Methodological Proposal for Examining Contested Concepts, with Consciousness as a Worked Example

Abstract

This working paper proposes Dimensional Dis–Integration, a procedure for examining contested concepts by decomposing them into components specified by the people who use them. It offers no theory of the phenomena concerned and no definition of the terms; its claims are epistemic and dialectical throughout. Consciousness serves as the worked example. Anaesthesiology, clinical neurology, philosophy and comparative psychology use the term for different collections of capacities, and disputes over its application to animals and artificial systems persist partly because those collections are never made explicit. The procedure elicits a working definition from an interlocutor or disciplinary community and decomposes it recursively, until each component either has agreed satisfaction conditions or reaches a recorded terminus. Each component then receives a disposition. Components are matched across frameworks by their satisfaction conditions rather than their labels, so that a single result can serve many frameworks. The output is not a verdict on whether anything is conscious but a map of which components are settled, contested, stipulated or terminal. The paper situates the procedure within the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and sets out its stopping rule, elicitation techniques, scoring conventions and limitations. It also describes a study that would test both the procedure and the effectiveness–complexity gradient on which it relies. Circulated as a preliminary proposal for critical comment (version 0.1).