Abstract
Modern data systems must support accountability across persistent legal, political, and analytic disagreement. This requirement imposes strict constraints on the design of any ontology intended to function as a shared substrate. We establish an impossibility result for ontological neutrality: neutrality, understood as interpretive non-commitment and stability under incompatible extensions, is incompatible with the inclusion of causal or normative commitments at the foundational layer. Any ontology that asserts causal or deontic conclusions as ontological facts cannot serve as a neutral substrate across divergent frameworks without revision or contradiction. It follows that neutral ontological substrates must be pre-causal and pre-normative, representing entities, together with identity and persistence conditions, while externalizing interpretation, evaluation, and explanation. This paper does not propose a specific ontology or protocol; rather, it establishes the necessary design constraints for any system intended to maintain a shared, stable representation of reality across conflicting interpretive frameworks.
Abstract (translated)
现代数据系统必须在持久的法律、政治和分析分歧中支持问责制。这一要求对任何旨在作为共享基础的设计施加了严格的限制。我们建立了一个关于本体论中立性的不可能性结果：理解为解释上的非承诺性和不兼容扩展下的稳定性，这种中立性与包含因果或规范性承诺的基础层是相互冲突的。任何断言因果关系或义务结论作为本体事实的本体都无法在没有修改或矛盾的情况下，在不同框架之间充当中立基础。因此，中立本体论基础必须是前因果和前规范性的，表示实体以及同一性和持久性条件，并将解释、评估和说明外部化。本文并未提出具体的本体论或协议；相反，它为任何旨在在相互冲突的解读框架下维护共享稳定现实表示的设计约束建立了必要性。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14271
