The analysis of radial decay identifies a structural failure mode in which agency, causation, and accountability become progressively unrecoverable as explanation expands. This analysis is diagnostic rather than fatalistic. It names what goes wrong but does not imply inevitability. See Appendix D2b.
This appendix completes the diagnostic arc by articulating stabilising disciplines that impede loss of causal recoverability where such loss is not desired. These disciplines are deliberately modest. They operate at the level of sentences and paragraphs, add no new content, and do not adjudicate truth or legitimacy. Their function is preservative rather than corrective.
Radial decay is not inevitable; it is what occurs when accountability salience is not actively re-tethered as explanation expands.
Accountability salience refers to the retained visibility of responsibility-bearing elements—agent, enacted process, and value-axis—within expanding explanation. It does not denote emotional emphasis or rhetorical force, but the structural conditions that make causal attribution possible.
Radial decay exploits a predictable mechanism of force migration:
from agentive verbs to nominal abstractions,
from accountable subjects to impersonal systems or contexts,
from causal predicates to correlational descriptors.
Once this migration is complete, discourse may remain grammatically coherent while no longer supporting causal attribution. Stabilisation must therefore occur during expansion, not retrospectively. Beyond the recoverability threshold—the point at which agency and process can no longer be reconstructed without conjecture—such disciplines can only impede further loss; they cannot restore full invertibility.
Each discipline preserves a distinct form of continuity. None is sufficient alone; together they constitute a minimal stabilising set. These practices do not aim to intensify claims, enforce judgement, or increase explicitness beyond what context requires. They exist solely to preserve the structural conditions under which accountability remains traceable.
Anaphoric tethering preserves value-axis continuity across abstraction and elaboration.
As explanation expands, evaluative posture tends to dissolve into mechanism. This discipline counters that drift by explicitly re-naming at least one moral or agential hinge already present in the discourse. The hinge is reiterated rather than reformulated in order to maintain continuity.
This practice prevents force drift, abstraction-led moral softening, and the replacement of posture with process description.
Agency reassertion preserves agent continuity.
Radial decay frequently proceeds by relocating responsibility into systems, incentives, or inevitabilities. Agency reassertion interrupts this movement by explicitly naming who resists, avoids, prefers, refuses, or benefits. Even a single clause re-introducing agency collapses abstraction back into accountability.
This discipline prevents inevitabilism, moral outsourcing, and structural excuse-making without requiring accusation or polemic.
Evaluative echo preserves lexical continuity.
As explanation lengthens, evaluative terms are often replaced with neutral descriptors. Evaluative echo counters this by repeating—rather than paraphrasing—one evaluative term from the originating claim.
Where anaphoric tethering re-states the hinge, evaluative echo preserves the exact evaluative term that carries it. This prevents tonal flattening, neutralisation of stakes, and drift into descriptive-only prose while leaving factual explanation intact.
The confrontation marker preserves epistemic posture clarity.
Some claims do not merely inform; they intrude upon comfort, self-image, or worldview. In such cases, explanatory expansion often reframes confrontation as optional insight, neutral analysis, or aesthetic observation. The confrontation marker resists this reclassification by explicitly signalling that a posture collision has occurred.
This discipline does not intensify language or demand response. It functions solely as a structural signal, preventing accountability-bearing claims from being absorbed into descriptive neutrality. Its role is to preserve the distinction between invitation and confrontation, so that accountability salience is not softened through reframing.
The confrontation marker prevents the aestheticisation of truth and the domestication of evaluative claims into optional interpretation.
The radius check preserves structural self-awareness.
As explanation expands, distance from the evaluative centre increases. The radius check introduces a minimal diagnostic pause by posing a single question:
If this sentence were read in isolation, would its accountability axis still be visible?
If the answer is no, radial decay has already occurred. This discipline does not reverse decay; it detects threshold crossing before further abstraction compounds the loss.
The radius check prevents unnoticed drift beyond recoverability and late-stage abstraction lock-in by reintroducing self-monitoring at points of expansion.
In contexts where compression pressure is high—such as limited time, heterogeneous audiences, or institutional authorship—full re-tethering of accountability may be impractical. In such cases, a Minimum Viable Re-Bind may be applied to impede further loss of causal recoverability.
The Minimum Viable Re-Bind requires that any expanded explanation include, at minimum:
one named agent,
one enacted verb, and
one explicit evaluative hinge.
This requirement does not aim to restore full causal structure or to adjudicate legitimacy. Its purpose is strictly preservative: to ensure that agency, action, and evaluative orientation remain jointly visible so that retrograde reconstruction remains possible if later required.
The Minimum Viable Re-Bind compresses the stabilising disciplines into a single operational check and is intended for use only where fuller articulation would be counterproductive or infeasible.
The stabilising disciplines articulated here are not an attempt to eliminate deixis, ellipsis, or presupposition. All natural communication depends upon shared context, background knowledge, and economical reference. Full explicitness is neither possible nor desirable, and attempts to enforce it universally would result in pedantry rather than clarity.
Radial decay does not arise from presupposition itself, but from the silent displacement of agency and accountability salience into context beyond recoverability. Presuppositions remain legitimate so long as the accountability they carry can, in principle, be reconstructed when queried. Decay begins when presuppositional economy becomes load-bearing while foreclosing retrograde reconstruction.
For this reason, the stabilising disciplines described here are context-activated, not defaults. In high-trust, high-context exchanges, they may remain dormant without loss. In written communication, institutional authorship, and high-stakes explanatory contexts, shared context is reduced and abstraction becomes more permanent. Where decay is not merely tolerated but actively undesired, these disciplines should be deliberately applied.
This framework therefore does not impose conversational maximalism. It specifies the conditions under which structural re-tethering becomes necessary to preserve causal recoverability.
The stabilising disciplines described here do not overlap with diagnostic or adjudicative instruments. They do not classify ontological boundaries, detect false relational continuity, or diagnose manipulation or framing strategies.
Their role is antecedent rather than competitive. They function as pre-diagnostic stabilisation, preserving the structural conditions under which later evaluation remains meaningful. Where stabilisation is applied during expansion, the need for downstream adjudication may be reduced or eliminated.
The relationship is therefore sequential: stabilisation preserves reconstructability; adjudication remains available when needed.
The stabilising disciplines articulated here do not restore truth, guarantee agreement, or ensure invertibility once the recoverability threshold has been crossed. They do not override ontology, coerce assent, optimise persuasion, or engineer consensus. Their use does not confer moral authority, nor does their absence imply error, bad faith, or distortion.
These disciplines are not corrective instruments. They cannot repair causal structures that have already collapsed, nor can they compensate for deliberate evasion. Their function is strictly preservative: to impede further loss of causal recoverability where such loss is not desired.
Accordingly, the absence of stabilisation does not in itself indicate manipulation or moral failure. It indicates only that explanatory economy has been permitted to outrun accountability. Whether that allowance is appropriate remains a contextual question, governed by intent, audience, and stakes rather than by this framework.
This appendix completes the analytical arc by pairing diagnosis with discipline. Radial decay identifies a structural failure mode; its mechanisms are described elsewhere. Here, the conditions under which that failure may be impeded are articulated without prescription, moralisation, or overreach.
What is offered is not a theory of communication, but a set of structural safeguards. These safeguards preserve the visibility of agency, process, and evaluative orientation as explanation expands, ensuring that accountability salience is not lost where it matters.
In this sense, the disciplines outlined here do not aim at correctness, persuasion, or resolution. They aim only at preserving reconstructability upstream, so that adjudication—if later required—remains intelligible rather than conjectural.
