The Inside of Generatedness: A Theory of Representational Sealing

This paper develops Representational Sealing Theory (ReST), a theory of one limit on any inquiry that asks after its own preconditions. Theoretical representation is conducted under a representational ‘law’ — a structured regime of admissible objects, distinctions, inferences and conditions of correctness — and the domain of representation constituted under a law is a ‘layer’. ReST separates three questions a layer may ask about a target: can it refer to it, can it form representations purporting to characterise it, and can it certify that those representations answer to it? For an ‘exterior’ target, which the layer’s law identifies only by its role and not as an object individuated under the law, the answers are yes, yes and no. That last answer is the ‘seal’. Adequacy may obtain without being endogenously certifiable: a representation of an exterior target may be exactly right, even known to be right on externalist terms, but no assessable basis available to the layer can settle that it is. The seal is not a thesis of ineffability. The frontier of what can be represented can move; the seal concerns whether, relative to a given law, representations of what lies beyond it can be certified as adequate. The seal rests on two substantive commitments: law-closure, that every procedure by which a layer could certify adequacy is governed by its own law; and the role–realiser distinction, that a role, however richly specified, can fail to individuate what fills it. Applied to a particular target, the seal also needs an evidential assumption: that the respects in which role-independent characterisations of the target differ make no difference to anything a procedure admissible under the layer’s law could record. For an exterior target satisfying it, the hypotheses a layer can rank form a closed lot, which nothing within the layer can check for an adequate member. The seal is the certification cost of the role–realiser distinction. ReST is conditional. A layer is ‘generated’ when its continuing obtaining depends on an exterior target, and the paper does not claim that any actual layer is. If one is, then, as a corollary of the seal, it cannot certify any role-independent characterisation of what the status of its states requires (‘referral’); and no succession or orientation of states follows. As an exploratory application, the paper asks whether referral bears on temporal order, and identifies the condition under which it would. The account contributes nothing to the content of physics.