A Formal Method for the Deconstruction of Structured Documents in Science, Law, Patents and Historical Sources

Abstract

Creators:Kriger, Boris. ORCID 0009-0001-0034-2903. Affiliations: Information Physics Institute, Gosport, Hampshire, United Kingdom; Institute of Integrative and Interdisciplinary Research, Toronto, Canada. Description: Scientific papers, statutes, constitutions, judicial opinions, patents, historical chronicles and manuscripts share a property that sets them apart from other texts: each claims to be a record or a rule rather than a story, and each is built from structured units linked by citation, delegation, dependency or copying. This article gives a single formal method for deconstructing such documents, extending the method developed earlier for biographical narrative (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23159974). A document is modeled as a frame acting on a documentary record in three strata (result or norm, inference, verdict), and deconstruction as the exchange of two conjugate roles inside the frame: signal and foreground, hypothesis and finding, rule and exception, prefatory and operative clause, embodiment and principle, support and text, author and copyist. Every exchange is classified as a clean relabeling, a residue or a blocked exchange, and the record (data, enacted text, or the material and readings of a manuscript) is proved immune to blocked exchanges, so that a blocked exchange always exposes a frame-constituted proposition. For science the article proves that a significance filter inflates published estimates by a ratio fixed by statistical power alone; that disjunctive selection on novelty or rigor makes attention and reliability negatively associated among published papers; that a role-free claim imported by citation is immune to every downstream exchange and can be exposed only at its origin; that every chain of citation support ends in a primary origin, an inferred origin or an invented edge; that citation path counts are independent of grounding; and that statistical consistency is not transitive, so a bridging measurement frustrates every two-camp account of a tension. For law it proves that Hohfeldian correlative pairs never carry residues, that review for ultra vires is an edge check while interpretively constituted norms and factual precedents can be exposed only where they were inferred, that conflict criteria (lex superior, posterior, specialis) yield a consistent hierarchy exactly when their decisions are acyclic, and that cycles are removed only by meta-rules or amendment. For patents it gives the opposite propagation of invalidating and validating evidence through the claim forest. For manuscript traditions it derives the elimination of copies and the priority of shared errors over shared retentions from the provenance theorems. Applications include the replication record of psychology, BICEP2, the arsenic-life paper, Greenberg's citation network, and the Hubble tension, where the early-versus-late narrative is shown to be a balanced classification only in a narrow band of thresholds below conventional significance; a Supreme Court factual precedent traced to a magazine article; the overruling of agency deference; the Second and Thirteenth Amendments; the supremacy conflict between the German Federal Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union; hindsight in patent law; Bédier's two-branched stemmata; and the Vinland Map. Appendices apply the method to Einstein's papers of 1905 and 1935, Watson and Crick (1953), the laws of Hammurabi, the Constitution of the United States, the French constitution of 1791, the Nuremberg Laws, Magna Carta, the Wright brothers' patent, the Russian Primary Chronicle, the Donation of Constantine, the Testimonium Flavianum and the Hitler diaries. The method is finally applied to its author's own work. Code for all computed figures and tables is included. Keywords (each as a separate entry):deconstruction; structured documents; scientific writing; meta-science; publication bias; citation networks; legal interpretation; hierarchy of norms; constitutions; patents; textual criticism; stemmatology; chronicles; source criticism; structural balance; holonomy; frustration; Hubble tension; Derrida Language: EnglishLicense: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 InternationalVersion: 1.0 Related works: Is supplement to / Continues: 10.5281/zenodo.23159974 (A Formal Method for the Deconstruction of Biographical Narrative) References: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26532.64648 (The Retrospective Drift Theorem) References: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32050.36809 (A vacuum without a microphysics) Subjects / communities: a good fit is to put the philosophy of science, legal theory and digital humanities communities next to each other.