Persistence Through Transformation: A Processual Framework for Knowledge Systems Across Cognitive, Cultural, and Religious Domains

How can knowledge systems preserve competence and identity while the organization supporting them changes? This theoretical article develops a processual framework for investigating persistence through selective transformation. It distinguishes a relational field from four interacting analytic dimensions: continuity, discontinuity, selective reorganization, and organizational emergence, while treating recursive epistemic niche construction as a longitudinal feedback mechanism rather than a fifth dimension. The framework brings together four requirements for explanation: an antecedent configuration, a specified organizational change, a capacity treated as persisting, and evidence concerning subsequent transmission. This architecture separates continuity of content, function, and identity and links conceptual change within individuals to the reproduction of distributed practices without assuming identical mechanisms across levels. A worked experimental proposal tests whether opportunities for reorganization preserve competence when inherited procedures no longer fit changed task demands. Religion provides a substantive case in which memory, ritual, epistemic authority, and cultural transmission can be investigated together. Eight conditional propositions connect the framework to cognitive psychology, cultural evolution, and historical psychology. The account distinguishes descriptive, causal, and transmissive persistence through transformation, separates persistence from epistemic justification, and specifies conditions under which faithful reproduction should outperform transformation. Its explanatory value depends on comparative prediction, intervention, and prospective failure conditions rather than on treating every instance of change as evidence of emergence.