Local Re-description versus Global Selection: the Locus of Empirical Content in a Maximum-Caliber Reconstruction of Quantum Mechanics

Local Re-description versus Global Selection This methodological note examines where genuine empirical content can arise in an inference-first reconstruction of quantum mechanics based on the maximum-caliber principle. Rather than introducing new physics, it clarifies the epistemological status of the programme's existing results. Central Question Can a reconstruction genuinely predict physical parameters, or does it merely re-express them in a different mathematical language? The note argues that this distinction depends on the level of the formalism being considered. Main Thesis The reconstruction naturally separates into two sectors: Local inferential sector: Fisher information, Legendre duality, Kähler geometry, quantum potential, and causal reconstruction. Global selection sector: closure conditions, self-consistency principles, attractors, and global constraints acting on the inferential frame itself. The local sector can generate deep and non-trivial mathematical consequences, but these remain analytic consequences of the chosen inferential framework. They therefore constitute re-descriptions rather than predictions. Local Re-description Theorem A central proposition establishes that any result obtained inside a fixed maximum-caliber framework is deductively entailed by the adopted constraints. Consequently, however sophisticated the derivation may be, it introduces no new empirical content beyond those premises. The distinction is made explicit between: deductive depth; empirical content. A result may possess great deductive depth while carrying no additional predictive power. Content as Exclusion The note adopts a Popperian notion of empirical content: a statement is informative insofar as it excludes possibilities. This criterion is then translated into Bayesian language through predictive concentration and Occam factors, showing that the exclusion criterion is already implicit within inference-based reasoning. Global Selection Principle A second proposition shows that no free parameter can be predicted from operations internal to a local inferential frame. Prediction necessarily requires a constraint acting on the framework itself. Such a constraint may take the form of: a closure condition; a self-consistency requirement; a dynamical attractor; a global selection rule. Excess Content Criterion Not every global principle is predictive. A genuine selection principle must possess excess content: it must forbid more than the value it was introduced to explain. Three requirements are identified: independence from the selected value; additional falsifiable consequences; selection of isolated points rather than continuous reparametrisations. Without these properties, a global principle becomes merely a re-description in global form. Applications The criterion is applied to several examples from the reconstruction programme: the interpretation of mass as inverse informational stiffness; the Z₃/Koide lepton-mass construction; proposed action–Hubble relations; attractor and renormalisation-group style selection mechanisms. The analysis concludes that local Fisher–Legendre–Kähler structures determine form but not parameter values, whereas genuine predictive power can only arise from global selection mechanisms possessing excess content. Ontological Consequence The note proposes a corresponding ontological distinction. The local sector is interpreted as representational and epistemic, describing how inference organises information. The global selection sector alone carries ontological commitment, because it determines which configurations are realised rather than merely represented. Conclusion The paper identifies the precise locus at which empirical content can appear within an inference-first reconstruction of quantum mechanics. Local reconstruction supplies mathematical form; prediction requires global selection. The decisive question is therefore not whether a result is global, but whether it carries excess content beyond the quantity it was designed to explain.