Word ：Retroactive Completion and the Underdetermined World

This OSF preregistration records the plan, scope, and evidential commitments of Word: Retroactive Completion and the Underdetermined World, a philosophical monograph about underdetermination, individuation, and freedom. The project is theoretical rather than empirical: it does not preregister a statistical design, human-subjects protocol, or data-collection procedure. Its purpose is to make the book’s central theses, dependencies, evidential tiers, and revision discipline explicit before or alongside public circulation of the manuscript. The research question is whether a single structure can explain a family of phenomena in which identity is not fully fixed by antecedent facts but becomes determinate through a later event. The project examines six domains: concepts, causes, questions, answers, physical values, and law. The culminating application is freedom. The guiding thesis is that underdetermination is not merely ignorance, vagueness, or defect. In the relevant cases, the identity of the item is structurally open before a completing event. The completing event does not reveal what the item was all along; it settles what the item thereby becomes. The main positive claim is the co-underdetermination lemma: if one item retroactively fixes another’s identity, and neither is antecedently individuated independently of the other, the pair is jointly underdetermined prior to the fixing event. The main negative claim is that each domain invites a hidden-fact posit — a fact that would have settled the matter in advance — and that these posits are uneconomical unless independently motivated. The book tests this pattern across concept individuation, causal selection, question identity, answerhood, legal standing, and agency. The planned structure is modular. Part I treats concept individuation and concept engineering; Part II treats causation and the claim that the effect fixes the cause in the relevant explanatory practice; Part III treats questions and uptake; Part IV treats answers as composites of content, question, asker, and practice; Part V applies the structure speculatively to physical values and is explicitly non-load-bearing for the book’s central claims; Part VI treats law as the domain in which completion is deliberately built, distinguishing constructible positions from protected standing; Part VII develops the theory of freedom as authorship of settling; Part VIII states the method, invariants, and retraction discipline. Appendices provide glossary, case files, citation conventions, ledgers, and a replication-register proposal for the AI-era knowledge system. The principal scope condition is independence from the speculative physical part. If Part V fails, the core arguments of Parts I–IV, VI, and VII are intended to stand. The legal materials are likewise treated as a legal face and case-file domain, not as hidden premises of the general theory. Their role is to show how completion operates in institutional practice, not to make the metaphysical argument true. The project’s theory of freedom is preregistered as follows. The standard free-will dilemma assumes that determination must be antecedent: if action is determined, it is not free; if undetermined, it is lucky. The project rejects that shared premise. It argues that an action and its outcome are jointly underdetermined prior to settlement and that freedom consists in authorship of the settling process. Authorship is analyzed through conditions such as the agent’s standing structure, answerability of the process, and registration of the settlement in the agent’s continuing capacity to ask, choose, and act. Evidential commitments are as follows. External claims must be cited to verifiable sources or marked by evidential status. Contemporary cases are not to carry more argumentative weight than their source status permits. Speculative claims are to be labeled. Corrections, citation debts, and retractions are to be recorded publicly. The manuscript’s AI-assisted composition is to be disclosed: the assistant may contribute drafting, checking, and mechanical labor, but the project’s questions, thesis commitments, revisions, and responsibility remain the author’s. The expected output is a public manuscript deposit, with versioned files, appendices, and ledgers sufficient for readers to audit the claims. The preregistration is therefore not a prediction of empirical results but a surveyable warrant for a theoretical project: it states what the book is trying to show, what would not count as support, which parts are non-load-bearing, and how revisions are to be recorded.