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.
Behaviourism took behaviour as the only admissible evidence and refused to speculate about what lay behind it. Cognitivism insisted something lay behind it and had no account of its structure. The field has been encamped on those two positions for most of a century. Action is what a mental model produces. Behaviourism was right that behaviour is the reliable signal, and wrong that there is nothing behind it. Cognitivism was right that there is something behind it, and stuck without a structure for what that something is. With a model that has information and organization, both are true at once: the model is real and structured, and behaviour is how it is read. Speech is an action. This matters more than it sounds. What a person says about their model is itself produced by a model — possibly not the same one driving what they do. Which yields a claim with teeth. Someone who says they know smoking is bad, and smokes, does not hold a model in which smoking is simply bad. If they did, the action would not follow. Somewhere in the model is a good, and the behaviour is reading it out. Compare someone who says stepping in front of a train is bad: that model has no good in it, and nobody has to resist stepping. So behaviour is the better instrument. Not because people lie, but because saying is one output and doing is another, and when they disagree the disagreement is itself the finding. It also runs backward: knowing someone's model lets you predict what they will do. Anyone who has been married a long time does this daily.
Action is what a mental model produces, and speech is one kind of action. Read in symbols: behaviour (B) is a function of the mental model (𝕄) — what someone does follows from how they have organized what they know. And speech is a subset of (⊆) behaviour: saying something is doing something. A statement about a model is not a window into it. It is another thing the model produced, and it can come from a different model than the one driving the rest.
Action is independent of the model. What people do is not determined by how they have organized what they know. Read in symbols: behaviour (B) is independent of (⟂) the mental model. If action were driven by conditioning alone, or by drives with no model behind them, then behaviour tells you nothing about organization and cannot be used to read it. The strong version of this is behaviourism's original position, and it is a real rival rather than a straw one.
If a mental model is what a person actually runs, then action cannot be separate from cognition and speech cannot be a report on it. Both have to be outputs of the same model — which means behaviour is where the model is legible, and what people say about their model is another output rather than a description. Four studies point that way, and none of them relies on self-report. The closest to a direct test used another person as the criterion: where one partner's model failed to match the other's lived reality, corrective behaviour followed later. A simulation in the same work showed that below a structural threshold no amount of effort produced the behaviour at all. What the behaviour tracked was the model, not the intention. One runs the reading in reverse and recovers a model nobody stated. Given solutions drawn from an independently established web of causes, people endorsed the ones fitting how they had organized the problem rather than what the problem contained. The organization was invisible until the choices revealed it. One treats speech as behaviour at scale: structural load across a legislature's full record predicted how far its speech diverged from the previous year, with length and period controlled. And one watched tens of thousands of people act with no instruction at all. What they did was uneven in a specific way, and what they did is the only evidence of what they were organizing. Different criteria, different scales, one direction.