Possibility and availability
These distinctions prevent “it has not happened” from quietly becoming “it cannot happen.”
Capacity≠expression
Capacity≠discovered capacity
Undiscovered≠inaccessible≠absent
Accessibility≠recruitment
Distinctions · 02
What mistakes does the grammar help prevent?
The framework begins by separating claims that ordinary language, institutions, and causal stories often compress into one another.
On this page
Three families of distinctions, a rule for respecting reports without accepting every explanation, and the cultural compression problem.
Observation and inference
These distinctions separate what happened from the mechanisms and traits we infer from it.
Recruitment≠expression
Expression≠explanation
Outcome≠cause
State≠trait
Report≠causal explanation
Person and category
These distinctions preserve organismic variation when categories, norms, and scripts simplify it.
Category≠person
Cultural rarity≠human incapacity
Cultural salience≠bodily potential
An epistemic rule
Believe the report. Test the explanation.
A person’s report is evidence about what they experienced. Neither the person nor an outside observer necessarily knows the full mechanism that produced it.
Respect for lived experience and scrutiny of causal explanation are not opposites. They are different epistemic commitments.
Culture compresses
Categories can coordinate complexity without containing the whole person.
Culture necessarily reduces high-dimensional human variation into categories, norms, scripts, identities, expectations, and defaults. Compression is not inherently harmful. Its limits matter when consequential distinctions disappear.
When a culture compresses human variation, the information does not disappear. The mismatch has to go somewhere.
Compression loss
Information about actual human variation that becomes obscured when reality is represented through a simplified cultural model.
Compression cost
The burden produced by consequential mismatch between organismic variation and the compressed model through which it is interpreted or organized.
These concepts name questions for investigation. They do not establish that every mismatch is harmful, identify one causal mechanism, or assume access to an uncompressed description of human reality.
Next question
Does restoring these distinctions help us see anything differently?
What follows
Applications puts the method to work across sexuality, sports, learning, and culture: observation, compressed description, redescription, and new questions.
Continue to Applications