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.
Camilleri and Idrissi, 2026, The Linguistic Review — Linguistics
Patterns: Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, Perspectives
A verb form is shown to be a whole composed of interacting structural parts, and the identical formal part is classified into different categories depending on which dialect system it sits within.
Comparative analysis of Arabic dialects found that verb forms are built from three concurrent morphological subsystems (affixation, prosodic templatic variation, and stem-vowel alternation), and that the same stem-vowel alternation functions as a meaningless pattern in Standard/Eastern dialects but as a meaningful transitivity marker in Western dialects.
Morphological exponence in Arabic verbal morphology deploys at least three concurrent realizational means: affixation, prosodic templatic variation, and stem-vowel alternation or ablaut). In this paper, we focus on stem-vowel alternation as a morphological exponent in Arabic verbal paradigms, mainly in the second stem-vowel (V2). Traditional accounts have associated V2 alternation mainly with aspect and voice . We show that such accounts fail to capture the full picture. Adopting a comparative dialectal perspective, we demonstrate that V2 ablaut displays two distinct grammatical profiles in the Arabic dialect continuum. In Standard Arabic and many Eastern dialects, the distribution of V2 alternation is best analyzed as morphomic , since it does not consistently map onto a single morphosyntactic or morphosemantic class across derivationally related verbal measures. In Western dialects, by contrast, this same alternation, at least across the set of V-final verbs (defective), can be analyzed as morphemic, encoding a valency contrast between transitive and intransitive stems. Our analysis further reveals a systematic East–West divide in Arabic verbal morphology. More generally, we argue that Arabic provides a striking case of distributed exponence, in which V2 alternation overlaps functionally both with templatic structure and affixation in the realization of aspect, voice , and valency . Additionally, by tracing the diachronic shift in Arabic verbal morphology from morphomic patterning to morphemic interpretation, we aim to shed light on how morphological systems may evolve toward grammatical transparency.
These researchers were not testing DSRP. The finding is theirs; the correspondence to DSRP is drawn by this site.