The Effectiveness Principle – Structure, Justification, and Scope

This work formulates a structural effectiveness principle as a necessary ordering condition for consistent physical description under extreme structural conditions. The point of departure is the observation that recurring inconsistencies in theoretical physics—most notably divergences, representation dependencies, and uncontrolled scalings of physical quantities—are not primarily rooted in missing dynamics or unknown high-energy physics. Rather, they arise from implicit assumptions concerning which formal contributions are allowed to be counted as physically effective without restriction. The effectiveness principle strictly separates ontological existence from physical effectiveness and fixes a prior structural ordering of physical contributions. Physical effectiveness is neither a causal nor a dynamical notion and carries no additional ontological status. It functions exclusively as an ordering quantity that determines whether, and to what extent, formal contributions may be counted as physically relevant under given structural conditions. Under minimal and widely accepted assumptions of consistent physical description, it is shown that unbounded physical effectiveness is structurally inadmissible. This leads to a formal no-go statement that does not exclude ontological degrees of freedom but rather the unrestricted physical counting of such degrees of freedom under extreme conditions. The approach has a pre-dynamical status and is not to be read as a physical theory, but as a structural ordering condition logically prior to dynamical model building. The viability of the principle is examined by means of several independent structural consistency tests, including near-horizon entropy, scaling with the number of degrees of freedom, and the trans-Planckian problem. These tests do not possess empirical falsification status; instead, they function as pass/fail criteria of structural consistency within the specified consistency framework. A complete German version of the paper is included in this record.