Naming Without Discovering: Language and the Foundation of Structures and Processes

Abstract

This paper argues that naming is stipulation, not discovery, and traces the consequences of that claim across two parts. Part One shows that any act of individuation — from ordinary nouns to technical terms like "atom" — cuts a boundary into what it calls boundless phenomenon, a boundary the phenomenon itself never supplied. This cutting produces what the paper terms the two-thing picture: a phenomenon on one side, an item singled out from it on the other, a structure that recurs in causal language, in claims about emergence, and in the sentence "the whole is different from the sum of its parts." Because every stipulation rests on a further stipulated criterion, justification terminates in an acknowledged, undefended stop rather than a discovered foundation. Part Two builds on this mechanism rather than escaping it, proposing a cascade of three stipulations — boundless phenomenon, process, and structure — connected by a "-wise" notation designed to name organized activity without reintroducing the two-thing picture at the seam between levels. The paper engages Whitehead, Hume, Nietzsche, Nāgārjuna, Wittgenstein, and Quine at specific points of contact, offering divergence rather than refutation throughout.