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 Callender, Glen Alexander
Year 2026
Publisher Zenodo
Kind of work report
Discipline Systems Science
Secondary disciplines Philosophy
Kind of engagement public
Applied false
Read it at the publisher 10.5281/zenodo.21949822
To test whether four principles — Things, Relationships, Change, and Constraints — can serve as a minimal, generative architecture for analyzing systems across domains, and whether higher-order frameworks, General Systems Theory and DSRP among them, can be represented, reduced to, or derived from it.
A conceptual argument. The framework began as a business methodology in which recurring patterns, particularly the role of constraints, suggested a more general structure; it was then abstracted and refined by testing, reduction, and comparison. An earlier six-principle model was cut to four by asking whether Resources and Outcomes require independent status or can be expressed through the other principles. The paper then asks whether systems, processes, feedback, hierarchy, emergence, adaptation, and perspective are higher-order configurations of the four primitives rather than primitives in their own right, and treats viewer-relativity as arising from the selection of Things, Relationships, Changes, and Constraints within an analytical frame rather than as a primitive. It closes with a comparison against General Systems Theory and DSRP, and a statement of the work required for independent evaluation.
Callender concludes that the four principles may form a distinct, minimal, lower-order architecture from which higher-order systems concepts can be represented or generated, while acknowledging overlap with existing research and disclaiming novelty for the underlying concepts. He presents the framework as a testable hypothesis rather than an established theory, and lists formalization, cross-domain testing, comparative analysis, derivation, and falsification as the work still outstanding. No empirical results are reported.
A self-published thesis proposing Things, Relationships, Change, and Constraints as the minimal primitives of systems, and positioning DSRP as a higher-order framework that it asks whether its own four primitives could generate. It argues that perspective is not primitive but arises from how an analytical frame is drawn.
Callender offers his architecture as a hypothesis and names the conditions under which it should be given up, which is more than most frameworks positioned against DSRP have done. What it does not yet have is results; the paper says as much, listing formalization, cross-domain testing, and falsification as work still to come. DSRP's four patterns have been tested in published experiments and are supported by a corpus of independent findings, and the condition that would refute the theory is published with it: produce thinking, or any organized body of information, that does not decompose into distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives. On the substance, the claim that perspective is not primitive does not hold. Viewer-relativity is said to arise from selecting Things, Relationships, Changes, and Constraints within an analytical frame — but an analytical frame is a point from which a view is taken, which is what perspective names. The selection step the derivation rests on already presupposes the pattern it is meant to produce, so P has not been removed from the architecture, only moved outside it and left undescribed. The other three primitives also reduce in the opposite direction from the one proposed: a constraint is a boundary, which is an identity-other distinction applied to a relationship or a system, and change is action and reaction unfolding over time, which is a relationship. Things and Relationships are D and R under other names, and part-whole structure, which the paper assigns to the higher order, is what makes a Thing decomposable into Things at all.
Patterns it shows D, S, R, P
Added 2026-10-18
How to cite this Callender, Glen Alexander (2026). A Proposed Four-Principle Generative Architecture of Systems - Thesis. Zenodo.