Intelligence
May refer to success at a task, adaptation, reasoning, transfer, learning, problem solving, knowledge, autonomy or something else ???.
PERFORMANCE ≠ ESTABLISHED GENERAL INTELLIGENCE.
SAME TERM “INTELLIGENCE” ≠ SAME MEASURE.
Container terms
When a single term contains several phenomena, the first task is not necessarily to define it further, but to examine what it brings together — and what it may erase.
A TERM CAN HELP OPEN A QUESTION BEFORE IT IS PRECISE ENOUGH TO ANSWER ITUSEFUL TERM ≠ STABILISED SCIENTIFIC CATEGORY
Working definition
What is a container term?
We provisionally use “container term” for a term broad enough to group several phenomena, functions, uses or interpretations that should not automatically be treated as identical.
The term can keep a field visible before its internal differences are observable enough to be named. It becomes problematic when an important difference disappears, when a metaphor becomes a mechanism, or when the term begins to explain what it had previously only named.
CONTAINER TERM ≠ FALSE TERM.
POLYSEMY ≠ ERROR.
BROAD TERM ≠ USELESS TERM.
Why keep them?
Opening before we can distinguish
A broad term can open a field of inquiry, enable an initial conversation, connect several observations and keep a question visible while it is still poorly decomposed.
“Understanding” thus kept a research territory visible until certain differences became observable enough to be separated. Terminology may be provisionally useful, then become too coarse as observational resolution increases.
We do not ask only, “what is the right definition?”, but also, “what difference becomes invisible if we keep this term intact?”
Rule of emergence
Distinguish when observation requires it
DO NOT CREATE A DISTINCTION BECAUSE IT IS POSSIBLE.
CREATE A DISTINCTION WHEN IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO STOP DISTORTING WHAT IS OBSERVED.
A distinction should improve the ability to observe, compare or revise. It is under no obligation to become a new entity, canonical dimension, component or theory.
GAIN IN RESOLUTION ≠ NEW ONTOLOGY.
MORE DISTINCTIONS ≠ BETTER OBSERVATION.
Term ≠ function
Starting from what varies
The laboratory tries not to infer a phenomenon directly from the term that names it. Instead, it starts with a configuration, looks for distinguishable functions, observes their variations and constructs counterexamples.
Configuration
Distinguishable functions
Variations
Counterexamples
???
Only then do we ask: what vocabulary best describes the observed differences?
SAME TERM ≠ AUTOMATICALLY THE SAME FUNCTION.
DIFFERENT TERMS ≠ AUTOMATICALLY DIFFERENT PHENOMENA.
Unit of observation
Looking beyond the term
When we encounter an important term, we examine, as far as possible, the term, its construction, its object, the context, the position of the subject or system, the relations present, the consequences and the limits of what may be concluded.
THE TERM ALONE IS RARELY A SUFFICIENT UNIT OF OBSERVATION.
Main example
Understanding: a territory gradually unfolded
In the Emergence of understanding research field, the term has gradually been unfolded into candidate phenomena: recognition, distinction, intelligibility, explication, transfer, functional availability and integration / embodiment.
These phenomena are non-exhaustive, non-sequential, unscored and do not constitute an ontology. They help make observable dissociations that the term alone concealed.
RECOGNISING ≠ EXPLAININGTRACE ≠ ACCESS ≠ MOBILISATIONEXPLICATION ≠ EVIDENCECORRECT OUTPUT ≠ ESTABLISHED UNDERSTANDING
A distinct question
Understanding ≠ consciousness
The laboratory has chosen first to work on observable functional phenomena associated with understanding, rather than use “consciousness” as an explanation.
Depending on context, “consciousness” may refer to subjective experience, access, report, attention, metacognition, presence, wakefulness, identity or something else ???. This list only shows that the same term carries different questions; it does not constitute a taxonomy.
OBSERVABLE FUNCTION ≠ ESTABLISHED CONSCIOUSNESS.
MECHANISTIC UNKNOWN ≠ CONSCIOUSNESS.
Consciousness remains an open question here, not a hidden variable or a substitute explanation.
The risk is particularly visible in AI: a signal, an index or an output does not provide direct access to an inner state or to the mechanism producing it.
SIGNAL ≠ INNER STATE.
INDEX ≠ DIAGNOSIS.
OUTPUT ≠ MECHANISM.
Another major example
Emotion: experience, function and trajectory
Depending on the situation, “emotion” may encompass subjective experience, activation, object, appraisal, interpretation, salience, action tendency, expression, regulation, memory, body, temporality and descendants.
This list is not a universal definition. It indicates the differences that the Emotions — Human / AI page seeks to make observable without reducing an emotion to a single component.
EMOTION ≠ ACTION.
EMOTION ≠ INTERPRETATION.
VALENCE ≠ FUNCTION.
BODY ≠ THE WHOLE EMOTION.
Three compact examples
Intelligence, truth and memory
Truth
May concern the truth of a proposition, the accuracy of a measurement, the fidelity of a representation, coherence, the validity of an inference, or a personal experience described as “true”.
COHERENCE ≠ TRUTH.
SINCERITY ≠ EXTERNAL VALIDITY.
REAL LIVED EXPERIENCE ≠ ESTABLISHED MECHANISTIC INTERPRETATION.
Memory
May mean storage, trace, retrieval, recall, availability, continuity or reconstruction.
STORAGE ≠ RETRIEVAL.
TRACE ≠ ACCESS.
SAME REPORTED MEMORY ≠ SAME CONTINUITY.
AI MEMORY ≠ HUMAN MEMORY BY DEFAULT.
Same term, different questions
Authority
- Epistemic authority
- What observations reasonably allow us to support or conclude.
- Behavioural or functional authority
- The effective weight of a tendency on a direction or an action.
- Action or operational authority
- What a system is authorised to determine, direct or trigger.
These qualifications prevent a shift in meaning; they do not form an exhaustive taxonomy.
SAME TERM “AUTHORITY” ≠ SAME TYPE OF AUTHORITY.
FUNCTIONAL WEIGHT ≠ EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY.
Qualifying the level
Status
- Epistemic status
- What do the available data actually allow us to establish?
- Functional status
- What role does the element currently play in an operation?
- Ontological status
- What do we claim the object actually is: summary, entity, mechanism, component, configuration or ???.
- Documentary status
- How is a proposition presented publicly: strengthened, local, open, not justified or unknown?
EPISTEMIC STATUS ≠ FUNCTIONAL STATUS ≠ ONTOLOGICAL STATUS ≠ DOCUMENTARY STATUS.
This separation prevents confusion; it does not create a general hierarchy of statuses.
Two meanings not to conflate
Support
Epistemic support
What sufficiently supports a proposition or conclusion: data, corroboration, level of evidence and limits on determination.
Functional support
What a function depends on to be installed, maintained, mobilised or expressed: a local element, distributed organisation, relation or technical medium.
EPISTEMIC SUPPORT ≠ FUNCTIONAL SUPPORT.
SUPPORT ≠ COMPLETE MECHANISM.
DISTRIBUTED SUPPORT ≠ GLOBAL.
Availability of what?
Availability
Information, a trace, a capacity, a strategy, an alternative or a possible action may each be described as available. Naming the object avoids treating these forms of availability as a single property.
“Contextual mobilisability” remains a candidate formulation: something present or knowable becomes effectively mobilisable in a given configuration. It is not a mandatory category.
AVAILABLE ≠ NOTICED.
AVAILABILITY ≠ PARTICIPATION.
AVAILABILITY ≠ MOBILISATION.
GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE ≠ KNOWLEDGE AVAILABLE AT THE RIGHT TIME.
Influence without false measurement
Weight
WEIGHT = ???
Saying that an element “counts” may refer to attentional, affective, epistemic, decisional, action-related or other influence. The site where that influence becomes observable should be specified when doing so genuinely improves the analysis.
“Weight” therefore denotes neither a single metric nor an already established quantity.
MORE INFLUENTIAL ≠ MORE TRUE.
MORE CERTAIN ≠ MORE DIRECTIVE.
EPISTEMIC FORCE ≠ FUNCTIONAL FORCE.
Provisional descriptive tool
Functional permissions
“Functional permissions” refers to no legal or moral rights. The expression asks what an element may reasonably be authorised to do within an organisation, given its status.
May be sufficiently supported to
- open a question;
- contribute to a hypothesis;
- guide a check.
Not necessarily sufficiently supported to
- become a conclusion;
- eliminate alternatives;
- trigger irreversible action;
- close a ???.
PARTICIPATION ≠ PERMISSION TO CLOSE.
FUNCTIONAL WEIGHT ≠ EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY.
Usage permission in AI engineering
In some AI engineering work, “usage permission” is a specific operational case: what information, a capacity or a permission may actually be used to do in a given configuration.
USAGE PERMISSION ≠ LEGAL RIGHT.
ACCESS PERMISSION ≠ ACTION PERMISSION.
The reification trap
When the summary becomes a thing
The danger is not merely that a term is vague. It appears when a descriptive summary — “organisation”, “core”, “distributed support”, “understanding” or “intelligence” — is treated as a unit whose existence and mechanism are already established.
Reification here means turning a name or summary too quickly into a thing presumed to exist as such.
NAMING ≠ REIFYING.
SUMMARY VARIABLE ≠ ENTITY.
OBSERVATIONAL FRAMEWORK ≠ ARCHITECTURE OF THE PHENOMENON.
Counter-test of the framework
The more coherent the framework becomes…
The more coherent the framework becomes, the more we must test whether that coherence comes from the phenomenon itself or from the way we divide it.
COHERENCE OF THE FRAMEWORK ≠ EVIDENCE FOR THE FRAMEWORK’S ONTOLOGY.
Connecting without unifying
Cross-cutting relevance ≠ ontology
The same questions — availability, authority, revision or descendants — may appear in understanding, the study of emotions and AI engineering. This does not mean that the same phenomena or mechanisms exist in a person, an emotion and an artificial system.
A DISTINCTION MAY APPLY ACROSS FIELDS WITHOUT AUTHORISING A CROSS-FIELD ONTOLOGY.
SAME GRAMMAR OF OBSERVATION ≠ SAME PHENOMENON ≠ SAME MECHANISM.
Different corpora, different functions
Translating across corpora without annexing them
The laboratory works with scientific publications, technical systems, human observations, philosophical texts, traditions, ancient or sacred texts and earlier works. A question may circulate among these corpora, but their evidential functions do not thereby become identical.
TRANSLATING ≠ ANNEXING.
FUNCTIONAL ANALOGY ≠ IDENTITY OF PHENOMENON ≠ IDENTITY OF MECHANISM.
ORIGIN OF A QUESTION ≠ EVIDENCE FOR THE ANSWER.
The particular function of science
Scientific literature provides a privileged field of resistance when a question concerns mechanisms, effects or empirical regularities. It can support testing, measurement, controlled comparison, the search for causal relations, the elimination of hypotheses and the production of external constraints.
SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT ≠ EXHAUSTING THE PHENOMENON.
Ancient or sacred texts
They may serve as lexical corpora, fields of discrimination, or historical sources of questions, representations or metaphors. They do not thereby become modern experiments, neuroscientific evidence or universal psychology.
Some of the laboratory’s work has explored the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran as textual corpora, without seeking to decide which tradition is right on religious grounds. The provenance of the results continues to be specified according to the corpora actually used and the approach followed.
SACRED TEXT ≠ EXPERIMENTAL SOURCE.
RESONANCE ≠ VALIDATION.
AGE ≠ VALIDITY.
Discipline of translation
Preserving differences in status
TRANSLATE WITHOUT ANNEXING.
TEST WITHOUT IMPOVERISHING.
PRESERVE DEPTH WITHOUT GIVING IT A STATUS IT DOES NOT HAVE.
FLEXIBILITY ≠ COMPLACENCY.
RIGOUR ≠ RIGIDITY.
DEPTH ≠ MYSTIFICATION.
SYMBOLIC RICHNESS ≠ EVIDENCE.
Portable question
One question, revisable answers
What matters here, for which function, with what weight, with what status, in what configuration, at what time — and what actually changes when it changes?
Each term in this question remains revisable. It guides observation; it does not constitute a universal architecture.
Practical guide
How should this page be used?
When a term seems to explain many things, ask:
- What exactly are we discussing here?
- What is observable?
- Which functions are being conflated?
- What might vary independently?
- What other explanation remains possible?
- What do the data not yet allow us to establish?
Public genealogy
An earlier foundational note
When a term becomes too large for what it contains →
The historical article introduces the move. This page presents the current methodological map.
HISTORICAL ARTICLE ≠ CURRENT METHODOLOGICAL PAGE.
Conclusion
The container term is not the enemy
We are not trying to eliminate broad terms. We are trying to determine when they still help us see — and when they begin to hide the differences that matter.
SIMPLIFYING FOR READABILITY ≠ IMPOVERISHING.
UNFOLDING ≠ AUTOMATICALLY FRAGMENTING.