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.
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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 Christopher, Curley
Year 2025
Publisher Medium (self-published)
Kind of work blog
Discipline Philosophy
Secondary disciplines Systems Science, Business & Management
Kind of engagement public
Applied false
The author argues that Western business thinking inherited a Newtonian account of causality that recognizes only the efficient cause, that this account fails on complex, recursive and chaotic systems, and that Aristotle's formal, material and final causes should be restored to systems work, with design serving as the formal cause.
A self-described working monograph and note to the author's own thinking, roughly 1,800 words and licensed CC BY 4.0, with no abstract. It opens on Contested Garment apportionment, which the author contrasts with Aristotelian proportionality; traces Newtonian, Cartesian and Kantian influence on business thought; expounds the four causes and the essentialism behind them, with pitcher and chair examples and an admitted preference for nominalism; argues that reductionism held from roughly 1700 to 1900 and then failed, citing quantum phenomena, recursive biology, Condorcet's paradox and the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction; states two objections to DSRP; and closes with a business application using a mortgage value stream and agile user stories, in which he identifies two errors — confusing the final cause with a requirements list, and confusing it with the efficient cause.
The author concludes that reductionist methods remain useful but insufficient and that the formal, material and final causes must be restored. Against DSRP he states two objections. The first is that it 'treats causality as force alone', so that 'In Cabrera, there's still an agent forcing the system forward', where systems such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction reach oscillating equilibrium without the force of agency. The second, given in a parenthesis, is that DSRP's 'distinctions aren't themselves distinct'. He also writes that design thinking and systems thinking are closely associated 'if they're not just the same thing from a different perspective (the P in Cabrera's DSRP)'.
DSRP makes an explicit, falsifiable claim: all thinking, and more generally all organized information, decomposes into distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives. The condition for refuting that claim is equally explicit: identify an organized body of information that cannot be decomposed into these four patterns. Evidence supporting the claim is publicly available, counterexamples are actively solicited, and proposed counterexamples are published and examined. By comparison, Aristotle's four causes, offered here as an alternative, are presented as a philosophical framework rather than an empirically tested ontology. No condition is specified under which their completeness or necessity would be rejected.
The objections also misunderstand the kind of claim DSRP makes. DSRP's R pattern is not a theory of physical causation. It is a claim about the elementary structure of relationships: every relationship has an action and a reaction, neither of which requires an intentional agent. The Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction illustrates this distinction particularly well. Its chemical oscillations emerge from coupled autocatalytic processes, inhibition, feedback, and diffusion. These involve relationships with action and reaction, organized within a system of interacting parts. No conscious agent or external director is required. The oscillating behavior emerges from the organization of those interactions. DSRP does not need additional categories of causation to represent this organization.
The proposed alternative also confuses 'composite concepts with elementary structures' Aristotle's formal, material, efficient, and final causes may be useful categories of explanation, but their usefulness does not establish them as irreducible primitives. A formal cause involves distinctions and part-whole organization. A material cause involves identifying constituents and their relationships to a whole. An efficient cause involves relationships through which change occurs. A final cause involves a perspective from which an outcome is identified as an end, together with relationships connecting means to that end. These are not missing elements of DSRP; they are higher-order constructions that can be expressed through its four elementary patterns. The question is not whether Aristotle's categories are useful, but whether they identify anything that cannot be constructed from DSRP.
The parenthetical objection that distinctions are not themselves distinct is similarly undeveloped. As written, it restates a central feature of the theory rather than contradicting it. DSRP holds that the four patterns are mutually implicative, not independently isolated. A distinction is made from a perspective; a system requires distinctions between parts and wholes; relationships depend on distinctions between what is related. The patterns are analytically distinguishable without being operationally separable. Demonstrating their interdependence therefore does not refute DSRP; it is precisely what DSRP predicts.
The connection drawn between design and perspective is a legitimate one, and the Cabreras have explored this same connection in their work on design thinking. Design involves taking a perspective from which a situation is framed, a desired outcome is distinguished, and parts and relationships are organized toward that outcome.
The central disagreement is therefore not whether Aristotle's four causes provide useful explanations. It is whether those categories are 'elementary and necessary, or whether they are themselves composite constructions of more fundamental patterns'. Showing that the four causes can be expressed using DSRP does not, by itself, establish DSRP's ontological necessity. That is an empirical question, and one for which DSRP specifies a falsification condition. Any proposed alternative should be subjected to the same standard.
Patterns it shows D, R, P
Added 2026-10-09
How to cite this Christopher, Curley (2025). Working Monograph on Aristotelian Causality in Systems Thinking. Medium (self-published).