Sterling Decision Framework — System Map v2.9 — Batch Update
Sterling Decision Framework — System Map v2.9 — Batch Update
Maintained by Dave Kelly. Theoretical framework: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). All instrument architecture, synthesis, and analytical contributions: Dave Kelly, 2026. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic).
Version History Entry
v2.9 — June 2026
Documents 42–51 added. New instrument family: Classical Restoration Instrument (CRI v1.0) and its first completed run series. New document type: Restoration Completion Essay (three instances). Working document produced (CRI Tractability Ranking — not corpus-registered). CRI run template established by Document 43 (Psychology — prescriptive mode). CRI run series-level finding registered: C1 (Substance Dualism) is the most consistently unrestored commitment across all audited frameworks and fields; the argument from intentionality is the single restorative move most needed across the broadest range of fields. Ratified by Dave Kelly, June 2026.
Document 42: Classical Restoration Instrument (CRI v1.0) — Dave Kelly
Status: Active instrument (ratified 2026). Layer: Instrument — Presuppositional Restoration Audit. Attribution: instrument architecture Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling’s corpus; AFR resources derived from documented methods of Plantinga, Huemer, Finnis, Anscombe, Ross, and Chisholm.
Purpose: Evaluates whether a named argument, position, or essay successfully restores one or more of the six classical commitments in a given domain of inquiry. Operates in two modes: (1) Evaluative — auditing whether an existing argument achieves restoration; (2) Prescriptive — specifying what argumentative moves are required for successful restoration in a field with identified displacement. Hybrid mode combines both. Complement of the CFA: where the CFA diagnoses displacement, the CRI evaluates or specifies restoration.
Architecture: Eight named restoration methods (M1–M8); four-step operational protocol with mandatory self-audit at each step transition; three commitment-level restoration findings (Fully Restored, Partially Restored, Restoration Attempted Unsuccessful, Not Addressed); three Restoration Completeness findings (Full, Partial, Minimal); eight named failure modes (Decorative Restoration, Method Substitution, Integration Evasion, Threshold Inflation, Corpus Boundary Violation, Register Deference, Completeness Conflation, Prior Alignment Assumption).
Aligned Figure Register (AFR): Documents the contemporary and modern philosophers whose argumentative records are substantially aligned with the six classical commitments. Comprehensive Alignment tier: Plantinga, Huemer, Finnis, Anscombe/Ross (intuitionist tradition), Chisholm. Strong Partial Alignment tier: Parfit, Foot, Nagel. AFR membership is the evidential basis of M1–M8; Register Deference (Failure Mode 6) prohibits treating AFR membership as itself a restoration warrant.
Abbreviations in use: EAAN (Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism — Plantinga’s argument that if naturalism is true, the probability that cognitive faculties are reliable truth-trackers is low or inscrutable, because natural selection selects for fitness rather than truth); AFR (Aligned Figure Register).
Document 43: CRI Run — Psychology (Prescriptive Mode) — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (ratified 2026). Layer: CRI Run — Prescriptive. Attribution: instrument architecture Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; prose rendering Claude.
CFA input: Classical Field Audit — Psychology (CFA v1.0). Capacity Loss: Full Capacity Loss. Five commitment-level CFA findings Contrary or structurally compromising; one Partially Aligned (C4). Mode: Prescriptive — no named argument evaluated; CRI specifies what restoration requires across each commitment domain.
Restoration Completeness Finding: Minimal. No commitment fully restored within Psychology’s governing framework. Two partial classical residues identified as restorative entry points: C4 (correspondence truth operative for empirical claims) and the C2 clinical residue (functional presupposition of genuine agency in the therapeutic encounter). Practical restoration sequence derived: C1 first as ontological ground → C4 in parallel → C3 and C5 in coordination → C2 and C6 following. Primary method gap across all commitment domains: M4 (structured positive account) most consistently absent; M6 (integration demonstration) most architecturally critical given five-commitment displacement profile.
Architectural note: Document 43 is the template document for CRI prescriptive runs. All subsequent prescriptive mode runs follow the protocol and format established here.
Document 44: CRI Run — Ethics (Hybrid: W.D. Ross) — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (ratified 2026). Layer: CRI Run — Hybrid. Attribution: instrument architecture Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; prose rendering Claude.
CFA input: Classical Field Audit — Ethics (CFA v1.0). Capacity Loss: Partial — Total Internal Contestation. Named argument: W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (1930) and Foundations of Ethics (1939). CPA input: CPA Run — W.D. Ross.
Commitment-level findings: C1 Partially Restored; C2 Partially Restored; C3 Fully Restored; C4 Fully Restored; C5 Fully Restored; C6 Fully Restored.
Restoration Completeness Finding: Partial Restoration. The four-commitment integration block (C3–C4–C5–C6) is the strongest restoration integration in the corpus of audited figures and the primary source record from which the CRI’s M4 definition is derived. Gap at C1: ontological ground of the integration block exposed to naturalist and error-theorist challenge. Gap at C2: practical authority of the framework’s moral responsibility account lacks philosophical grounding against compatibilism. Both gaps addressed in Document 45.
Document 45: Completing the Rossian Framework — Restored Arguments for C1 and C2 — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (standalone restoration completion essay; ratified 2026). Layer: Restoration Completion Essay. Attribution: analysis and synthesis Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; AFR resources Chisholm (C1 and C2) and Plantinga (C1), adapted; primary intuitionist framework W.D. Ross; prose rendering Claude.
Purpose: Supplies the philosophical arguments missing from Ross’s framework at C1 and C2, integrated with the four-commitment block Ross fully restores. C1 argument: intentionality argument (Chisholm) establishing that the rational faculty’s acts of moral recognition are genuine intentional acts whose aboutness is categorically irreducible to physical causation; EAAN (Plantinga) establishing that a faculty shaped entirely by evolutionary selection aimed at fitness cannot be reliably aimed at non-natural moral truth. C2 argument: Chisholm’s three-part elimination argument (determinism fails, indeterminism fails, therefore agent causation required), adapted to the Rossian domain of prima facie duty adjudication; threshold argument (M8) establishing the minimum libertarian freedom required for Ross’s culpability claims. Closing synthesis renders all six commitments as explicit mutual-dependency map. Companion to Document 44.
Document 46: CRI Run — Theology (Hybrid: Alvin Plantinga) — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (ratified 2026). Layer: CRI Run — Hybrid. Attribution: instrument architecture Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; prose rendering Claude.
CFA input: Classical Field Audit — Theology (CFA v1.0). Capacity Loss: Partial — Philosophical Infiltration. Named argument: Alvin Plantinga, primary texts God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993), Warranted Christian Belief (2000), Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011). CPA input: CPA Run — Alvin Plantinga.
Commitment-level findings: C1 Fully Restored; C2 Fully Restored; C3 Fully Restored; C4 Fully Restored; C5 Fully Restored (Extended); C6 Fully Restored.
Restoration Completeness Finding: Full Restoration. First Full Restoration finding in the CRI series. All six commitments restored in a mutually supporting six-commitment integration block. C5 Extended finding: the sensus divinitatis account extends direct recognition beyond moral facts (Ross) to theological facts, establishing direct recognition as a structural capacity of the human person operative in multiple epistemic domains. Single integration gap: the Reformation divide at C2 is a theological rather than philosophical gap and does not penetrate the philosophical restoration.
Document 47: CRI Run — Law (Hybrid: John Finnis) — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (ratified 2026). Layer: CRI Run — Hybrid. Attribution: instrument architecture Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; prose rendering Claude.
CFA input: Classical Field Audit — Law (CFA v1.0). Capacity Loss: Partial — Theoretical Groundlessness. Named argument: John Finnis, primary texts Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980), Fundamentals of Ethics (1983), Moral Absolutes (1991), Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (1998), Intention and Identity (2011), Collected Essays (5 vols., 2011). CPA input: CPA Run — John Finnis.
Commitment-level findings: C1 Partially Restored; C2 Fully Restored; C3 Fully Restored; C4 Fully Restored; C5 Fully Restored; C6 Fully Restored.
Restoration Completeness Finding: Partial Restoration. Five-commitment integration block (C2–C3–C4–C5–C6) is the most comprehensive integration within a legal philosophy in the corpus. Gap at C1: exposed specifically to critical legal theory’s constitutive thesis — the most practically urgent C1 challenge in the series because critical legal theory is the dominant tradition in academic legal scholarship in many jurisdictions. Gap addressed in Document 48. Comparison with Ethics/Ross: same overall finding, same pattern (five/one), same gap commitment (C1) — the natural law tradition and the intuitionist tradition share the identical C1 exposure.
Document 48: Completing the Finnisian Framework — Restored Argument for C1 — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (standalone restoration completion essay; ratified 2026). Layer: Restoration Completion Essay. Attribution: analysis and synthesis Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; AFR resource Chisholm, intentionality argument adapted to the Finnis legal domain; primary natural law framework John Finnis; prose rendering Claude.
Purpose: Supplies the philosophical argument missing from Finnis’s framework at C1, integrated with the five-commitment block Finnis fully restores. The specific challenge addressed is critical legal theory’s constitutive thesis: the legal subject is substantially constituted by his social, economic, and political conditions. The argument from intentionality establishes that the legal subject’s acts of practical recognition are genuine intentional acts directed toward real moral objects with genuine aboutness that is categorically irreducible to causal determination by social conditions. Self-defeat of the constitutive thesis: the critical legal theorist’s own theoretical recognitions presuppose the prior rational faculty his thesis denies. Integration with five-commitment block: C1 mapped onto each of C2, C3, C4, C5, C6 individually, establishing that C1 is the ontological ground without which each commitment is exposed to the constitutive challenge. Companion to Document 47.
Document 49: CRI Run — Epistemology (Hybrid: Alvin Plantinga) — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (ratified 2026). Layer: CRI Run — Hybrid. Attribution: instrument architecture Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; prose rendering Claude.
CFA input: Classical Field Audit — Epistemology (CFA v1.0). Capacity Loss: Partial — Self-Referential Contestation. Named argument: Alvin Plantinga, primary texts Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993), Warranted Christian Belief (2000), Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011), The Nature of Necessity (1974). CPA input: CPA Run — Alvin Plantinga. Note: distinct audit from Document 46 (Theology); Epistemology is Plantinga’s primary philosophical domain; findings derived independently from epistemological domain analysis.
Commitment-level findings: C1 Fully Restored; C2 Partially Restored; C3 Not Addressed (Non-Operative); C4 Fully Restored; C5 Fully Restored; C6 Fully Restored.
Restoration Completeness Finding: Partial Restoration. Four-commitment integration block (C1–C4–C5–C6) is internally coherent and not exposed at its ontological ground — the structurally strongest Partial Restoration in the series. Gap at C2: affects the framework’s virtue-epistemological dimension (intellectual virtue as genuine achievement, epistemic attention as genuinely disciplinable) without threatening the core warrant architecture. Restorative direction: Stoic discipline of assent adapted to the proper function framework. Self-referential integration advantage: the self-defeat arguments at C1, C4, C5, and C6 are more powerful in Epistemology than in any other field because anti-classical positions are epistemological theories presented as genuine knowledge, presupposing precisely what they deny. Structural contrast with Ethics/Ross and Law/Finnis: those runs gap at C1; this run gaps at C2 with C1 fully restored.
Document 50: CRI Run — Literary Criticism (Hybrid: The Author, the Text, and the Real) — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (ratified 2026). Layer: CRI Run — Hybrid (self-audit variant). Attribution: instrument architecture Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; prose rendering Claude.
CFA input: Classical Field Audit — Literary Criticism (CFA v1.0). Capacity Loss: Partial — Foundational Incoherence. Named argument: The Author, the Text, and the Real: Literary Criticism Restored (Dave Kelly, 2026). First CRI run in the series where the named argument is a corpus document. Failure Mode 6 (Register Deference) applied with heightened vigilance: corpus provenance does not exempt from the load-bearing test.
Commitment-level findings: C1 Partially Restored; C2 Partially Restored; C3 Fully Restored; C4 Partially Restored; C5 Fully Restored; C6 Partially Restored.
Restoration Completeness Finding: Partial Restoration. Lowest Restoration Completeness score in the series (two Fully Restored, four Partially Restored). The lower score reflects the counter-theory essay format rather than philosophical deficiency: the essay makes correct restorative claims at all six commitments but does not supply the full philosophical defense of C1, C2, C4, and C6 against the specific theoretical challenges the field has mounted. Two Fully Restored commitments (C3 and C5) are the essay’s central achievement: C3 via the self-defeat argument against political criticism’s selective moral anti-realism; C5 via the rehabilitation of direct perceptual recognition. The two Fully Restored commitments are the most directly expressed in the field’s ongoing practice: every evaluative judgment presupposes C3; every act of close reading presupposes C5.
Document 51: CRI Run — Philosophy (Hybrid: Philosophy as a Way of Life) — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (ratified 2026). Layer: CRI Run — Hybrid (self-audit variant). Attribution: instrument architecture Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; prose rendering Claude.
CFA input: Classical Field Audit — Philosophy (CFA v1.0). Capacity Loss: Partial — Self-Displacement. Named argument: Philosophy as a Way of Life: A Restorative Account (Dave Kelly, 2026). Second CRI run in the series where the named argument is a corpus document.
Commitment-level findings: C1 Partially Restored; C2 Fully Restored; C3 Fully Restored; C4 Fully Restored; C5 Fully Restored; C6 Fully Restored.
Restoration Completeness Finding: Partial Restoration. Five Fully Restored findings — strongest counter-theory essay result in the series. Gap at C1: the argument from practical consequence is the strongest C1 argument in any corpus counter-theory document; the philosophical defense against physicalism (type identity thesis, naturalization of epistemology, evolutionary debunking) is not supplied. C2 is the essay’s strongest restoration: the Stoic discipline of assent applied to philosophical formation produces the most fully developed practical account of libertarian epistemic agency in the corpus. Integration demonstration is the most explicit in the series: the governing claim that without all six commitments philosophy as a way of life is theoretically impossible is itself the M6 argument. Convergence finding: same pattern as Law/Finnis (five Fully Restored, C1 gap) from a different argumentative tradition — confirming C1 as the most consistently unrestored commitment across the series. Gap addressed in Document 52.
Series-level finding registered: C1 is the most consistently unrestored commitment across all CRI runs. The argument from intentionality is the single restorative move most needed across the broadest range of fields and frameworks. Philosophy is the source field; C1 completion here (Document 52) makes the argument available for every downstream field.
Document 52: Completing the Philosophical Framework — Restored Argument for C1 — Dave Kelly
Status: Corpus document (standalone restoration completion essay; ratified 2026). Layer: Restoration Completion Essay. Attribution: analysis and synthesis Dave Kelly; theoretical foundations Grant C. Sterling; AFR resources Chisholm (intentionality argument) and Plantinga (EAAN), both adapted to the philosophical domain; primary framework Philosophy as a Way of Life: A Restorative Account (Dave Kelly, 2026); prose rendering Claude.
Purpose: Supplies the philosophical argument missing from the counter-theory essay at C1, integrated with the five-commitment block the essay fully restores. Addresses three specific C1 challenges in the philosophical domain: the type identity thesis (mental states identical to physical brain states); the naturalization of epistemology (Quine’s replacement of normative epistemology with descriptive cognitive science); and the evolutionary debunking of philosophical cognition (cognitive faculties shaped by fitness selection cannot be reliably aimed at philosophical truth). The intentionality argument (Chisholm) closes the type identity thesis: intentionality — genuine aboutness — is categorically irreducible to causal relations between physical states; mental states have this property; physical brain states do not and cannot. The EAAN (Plantinga), adapted to philosophical cognition specifically, closes the naturalization of epistemology and the evolutionary debunking: the naturalist philosopher who uses evolved cognitive faculties to argue for naturalism has a defeater for the reliability of those faculties in the philosophical domain by his own account. Self-defeat of eliminativist physicalism: the eliminativist philosopher who presents his position as a genuine philosophical argument presupposes intentionality in every moment of that presentation. Integration with five-commitment block: C1 mapped onto C2, C3, C4, C5, and C6, establishing that each commitment requires the ontological ground C1 supplies. Strategic consequence: Philosophy is the source field for all downstream displacements; the C1 argument established here in its most general philosophical form is available to every downstream field that requires it. Companion to Document 51.
Section 6 Update: Active Projects
Classical Restoration Instrument (CRI v1.0) — Status: Active (ratified 2026). See Document 42. Eight completed runs registered (Documents 43–51, excluding working documents). Three Restoration Completion Essays produced (Documents 45, 48, 52). Full Restoration achieved: Theology/Plantinga (Document 46). Series-level finding: C1 is the most consistently unrestored commitment; argument from intentionality is the highest-priority restorative move across all fields. Next scheduled run: History (prescriptive mode).
CRI Run Sequence — Remaining Fields: History (prescriptive), Political Theory (prescriptive; Political Application Constraint noted), Journalism (prescriptive), Economics (prescriptive), Education (prescriptive), Psychiatry (prescriptive; Medicine run informs), Sociology (prescriptive), Anthropology (prescriptive).
Sterling Decision Framework — System Map v2.9. Maintained by Dave Kelly. Theoretical framework: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). All instrument architecture, synthesis, and analytical contributions: Dave Kelly, 2026. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic).
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