The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
Try a different term or clear the filters.
This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Authors Cabrera, Derek
Year 2026
Publisher Journal of Systems Thinking
Kind of work article
Discipline Systems Science
Read it at the publisher 10.54120/jost.v26i1.dc6sdos6
System dynamics (SD) is among the most formally developed traditions in systems thinking and is sometimes conflated with systems thinking itself. Its distinctive constructs – variables, causal links, feedback loops, stocks, flows, delays, boundaries, and related higher-order structures – provide a powerful language for representing and studying dynamic behavior. DSRP-484 makes a more elemental onto-epistemic claim: organization itself is generated through four recursively enclosed Patterns – Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives – composed of eight elemental roles and governed by four structural dynamics. This paper asks whether the organizational structures distinctive to system dynamics require anything outside DSRP-484. Using the O-Theory distinction between information and organization, X = I x O, we develop a structural-remainder test that decomposes SD constructs until either their organization is fully generated by DSRP-484 or an irreducible residual remains. Variables decompose as distinguished identities; stocks as quantified part-whole Systems; flows as quantified Relationships that change Systems; feedback loops as Systems of recursively linked Relationships; delays as temporal information carried by Relationships or as decomposable process-Systems; boundaries as recursively enclosed DSRP structures; and aggregation and disaggregation as recursive part-whole transformations. Mathematical and computational machinery used by SD – including differential equations, numerical integration, and simulation – is not distinctive SD ontology and therefore does not enlarge the organizational basis supplied by SD itself. We then apply the structural-remainder test to a pre-committed candidate set of 60 constructs drawn from the field's own vocabulary under a fixed extraction rule. All 60 decompose without requiring an additional organizational primitive. No residual X is identified. The result supports strict structural containment: O_SD is properly contained in Cl(O_DSRP-484). The result also has a methodological implication. If SD's characteristic constructs are specialized composites rather than organizational primitives, beginning inquiry with stocks, flows, feedback, and delays can bias the analyst toward seeing the organization those forms are designed to represent. DSRP can instead operate upstream: first determining what distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives the phenomenon contains, and only then determining which of those structures should be instantiated in an SD model – a workflow already demonstrated by Caddell and Nilchiani in their construction of a system dynamics model of interpersonal trust. System dynamics therefore remains a powerful domain-specific modeling method, but both its organizational foundations and the thinking used to construct its models can be situated within a more elemental organizational calculus.
First run in the structural-containment series. Asks whether the organizational structures distinctive to system dynamics require any primitive outside DSRP-484, using a pre-committed extraction rule and a decision rule fixed before any construct was examined.
Sixty canonical constructs entered the candidate set under the extraction rule, with seventeen exclusions logged by category. All sixty decompose without requiring an additional organizational primitive: twenty-one in Sections 4–13, twenty-four in Section 16, twelve as composites of already-decomposed elements, and three as purely informational. No residual X was identified anywhere, which Cabrera reports as strict containment rather than mere containment. Three further findings emerged that the test was not designed to produce. First, constructs SD treats as straightforward properties of a model – model order, behavior mode, credibility, and where a boundary is drawn – carry substantial Perspective structure the field's vocabulary does not name. Second, the strongest apparent candidate for a residual did not produce one: a generic Relationship never promised proportionality, so nonlinearity is an informational constraint rather than a new organizational primitive. Third, a methodological implication – if stocks, flows, feedback and delays are specialized composites, starting there can bias the analyst toward the organization those forms are built to represent, whereas DSRP can operate upstream.
Our reading: this is the run that fixed the protocol the network science and UML papers then reused unchanged – the information/organization decision rule, the pre-committed candidate set drawn only from the field's own documents, the logged exclusions, and the residual category X that gives the test a way to fail. Its bearing on DSRP is that the most formally specified tradition in systems thinking, the one with real equations and a simulator, yields no structure the calculus cannot generate. The Perspective finding is the more interesting secondary result: P turns up throughout SD's own vocabulary while going unnamed, which is the same asymmetry the Cognitive Pareto Law predicts.
Nominating sources for C_SD: the field's official glossary (Ford), every construct named as a foundation or thread in Richardson's reflections, and Forrester's statement of the field's subject matter ("high-order nonlinear feedback structures"). Sterman's textbook glossary serves as a robustness check – any construct defined there but absent from the nominators can be appended under the same filter without disturbing an existing ruling. Exclusion categories, pre-declared: numerical or mathematical procedure, modeling practice, notation artifact, general term, imported theory. Decision rule: a feature is organizational if changing it changes what entities or relationships exist, or how they are distinguished, bounded, nested, ordered, related, or framed; informational if it changes only the content or value instantiated in a structure that remains. Cabrera states the strongest objection to his own scoping himself – Forrester held continuity to be constitutive of SD, not borrowed – and answers it three ways, the structural one being that the continuous/discrete choice sets the grain of a temporal Perspective while leaving the point-view structure intact. Construct-by-construct rulings, proposed decompositions and the exclusion log ship as a supplementary instrument available on request.
Patterns it shows D, S, R, P
Shows the structure is there, Shows it makes a difference
How to cite this Cabrera, Derek (2026). Is System Dynamics Made of DSRP?. Journal of Systems Thinking.