Conceptual Archaeology and Metatheoretical Formalization (CAMF) A Methodological Programme for Canonical Standardization in Techno-Scientific Convergence

The accelerating convergence of scientific and technological domains — from nanotechnology and biotechnology to information technology and cognitive science — has generated a new class of epistemological problem. Numerous concepts operate across multiple disciplinary boundaries with extraordinary generative power while lacking the canonical formalization necessary to anchor inter-paradigmatic communication, support coherent derivative terminology, and ground ethical implications. Existing approaches to conceptual clarification — philosophical conceptual analysis, historical epistemology, the theory of thought collectives, and scientific terminology — each address aspects of this problem but none provides a systematic, replicable methodology for the canonical formalization of semantically diffuse metatheoretical concepts. This article presents Conceptual Archaeology and Metatheoretical Formalization (CAMF), a methodological programme that integrates these four traditions, together with contemporary conceptual engineering, into a three-phase procedure: (1) candidate detection and structural damage diagnosis; (2) diachronic genealogy and synchronic thought-collective mapping; (3) canonical formalization producing a stable hard core, demarcatory constitutive properties, and a scale model that resolves polysemy without destroying interdisciplinary fertility. CAMF’s scope is deliberately bounded: it is designed for concepts whose polysemy originates in divergent but reconcilable conceptual and sociological commitments, not in unresolved empirical disputes — a boundary the article makes explicit through a negative case, Machine Consciousness, which CAMF’s own diagnostic apparatus identifies as falling outside its domain of resolution. The programme is applied, illustratively rather than as a validated instrument, to two frontier candidates of contemporary relevance — AI Alignment and Synthetic Life — showing in each case how the method’s detection, genealogical, and formalization phases can be carried out and what canonical formulations they yield. CAMF is offered as a methodological contribution to the epistemology of techno-scientific convergence, and as a candidate instrument — still to be tested through independent application — for diagnosing and addressing a specific and consequential form of conceptual instability.