Constraint and Explanation in a Minimal Ontology: From Solipsism to Conatus

This paper offers a formal-structural account of the conditions under which structural realism and explanatory adequacy become possible under epistemic locality, without presupposing an external world. Starting from a methodologically solipsistic point of departure, understood as the minimal first-person givenness of non-collapsing persistence, it derives the necessity of constraint and its minimal realization as a constraint structure C=(X,R). From this, epistemic locality follows: each operational array has access only to a local substructure of the constraint structure. Under this condition, explanation is reconstructed as local constraint reconstruction together with the preservation of still-unexcluded possibilities, and explanatory adequacy is introduced as an ordering over constraint-preserving reconstructions. Because such reconstruction cannot be completed within a single operational trajectory, it requires comparison across operational arrays and is stabilized through the reduction of collective structural error. Science is thereby understood as an iterative correction of local reconstructions under shared constraint. From the same structure, conatus is derived as a trajectory-level condition for persistence under constraint, formalized through the coordinate system (A,I,W,η). The framework then offers a structural reconstruction of action-evaluation and moral evaluation as dynamics over conatus configurations, rather than treating them as products of external normative primitives. The framework connects structural realism, epistemic locality, explanation, collective reconstruction, science, and conatus within a single constraint-based sequence, while treating identity, quantum interpretation, freedom, moral evaluation, and formal incompleteness as robustness tests of the gap between local access and global constraint structure. [Notice] A Korean translation of this paper is available at:10.5281/zenodo.19952814