The Common Profile — Findings Across Four CIA Runs v1.0

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Draft for ratification. Not rendered.

I. The Finding

Four targets have now been audited under the Classical Ideological Audit v3.0: Epicureanism, Marxism, cognitive behavioural therapy, and Scottish common-sense realism. Three of them return the same profile.

              Epicureanism  Marxism      CBT          Reid
C1            Divergent     Divergent    Divergent    Convergent
C2            Divergent     Divergent    Divergent    Partial Conv
C3            Divergent     Divergent    Divergent    Partial Conv
C4            Struct Imit   Struct Imit  Struct Imit  Convergent
C5            Struct Imit   Partial Conv Struct Imit  Convergent
C6            Divergent     Divergent    Divergent    Partial Conv
Dissolution   Full          Full         Full         None

The exact figure is seventeen of eighteen cells identical across the first three targets, with one deviation at C5 in the Marxism run. Full Dissolution three times out of three. And across all eighteen cells, in three systems audited independently, not one Convergent finding.

These are an ancient Greek philosophical school, a nineteenth-century theory of history and political economy, and a twentieth-century clinical psychology. They share no lineage, no method, no vocabulary, and no subject matter. They produce one profile.

II. What the Uniformity Is Not

Not an instrument artifact. This was the first hypothesis and it is now ruled out. The Reid run moved every cell and moved the dissolution finding. An instrument that returns its own shape regardless of input could not have done that. The CIA discriminates.

Not, entirely, a target-selection artifact. All three targets are naturalistic about the person, and once that is granted, C1 and C2 Divergent follow near-analytically, with much of C3 and C6 following from C1. That is a real partial explanation and it should be held.

But it does not reach the whole result. Naturalism does not entail that a system will retain a foundationalist architecture — a naturalistic system could simply reject foundationalism and return Divergent at C4. All three retained it. Naturalism does not entail that a system will operate a correspondence account and point it somewhere other than the moral domain — it could dispense with correspondence entirely. All three kept it and pointed it away. Those two cells are the ones the selection hypothesis fails to explain, and they are the two cells where the finding is Structural Imitation.

III. What the Uniformity Is

One template, instantiated three times.

A natural fact is put where the moral fact was, and the architecture around it is left standing.

The three do this at every node:

Where the corpus has a rational faculty distinct from the physical order, they have fine-grained atoms, class position, or lawfully modifiable cognition.
Where the corpus has origination of assent, they have the swerve, historical-material determination, or trained skill strength.
Where the corpus has direct rational apprehension of moral truth, they have felt pleasure and pain, the standpoint of a class, or empirical outcome data and client preference.
Where the corpus has self-evident foundational propositions, they have sensory impacts and hedonic states, material conditions and relations of production, or contingent learned schemas — items that are foundational in a causal or architectural sense and never in a justificatory one.
Where the corpus has correspondence in the moral domain, they have correspondence in the sensory, the historical, or the predictive domain, and nothing in the moral one.
Where the corpus has virtue as the only genuine good, they have a state: ataraxia, the emancipated condition of a class, restored functioning.

The C4 cell is the signature. A system that had rejected foundationalism outright would return Divergent there and would look, to a reader, like what it is — a rival. A system that keeps the architecture and changes the contents looks rigorous. It has criteria; it has stopping points; it does not appeal to vague intuition. That appearance is what the Structural Imitation finding exists to record, and its recurrence across three unrelated systems is the most substantive result in the series.

The single deviation confirms the template. Marxism returns Partial Convergence at C5 rather than Structural Imitation, because it claims genuine objective correspondence for its own account of history and matter while withholding it from rival moral and political claims. That is a difference of scope, not of kind. The correspondence is granted precisely where the system takes itself to be doing science and withheld precisely where the corpus needs it. Examined, the exception runs the same pattern as the rule.

IV. What Reid Shows About the Shape of the Disagreement

The control run does more than clear the instrument. It shows that the corpus stands in two categorically different relations to systems that disagree with it.

Reid shares the architecture and the kind of content that fills it: self-evident propositions at the foundational nodes, moral facts that obtain independently of belief, correspondence extended to the moral domain, origination rather than indeterminacy. His three Partial Convergence findings are first-order disagreements inside a shared framework — origination predicated of volition rather than of assent, common consent used as a mark of self-evidence, a second rational end admitted at Theorem 10. A corpus argument with Reid is an argument between two parties who agree about what a person is.

The other three do not disagree with the corpus about the answers. They disagree about what the questions are answers to. No Dissolution against Full Dissolution is the instrument's way of recording that difference, and the series now demonstrates that it tracks something real.

V. The Case That Matters Practically

Epicureanism and Marxism announce themselves. A man adopting either knows he is adopting a system, and knows it has a view about what he is.

CBT does not present as doctrine. It presents as method, and most people meet it not as a philosophy but as care. It carries the same profile as the other two while arriving without any of the markers that would prompt examination — and, in the Stoic-adjacent literature specifically, it arrives wearing the vocabulary of the thing it displaces. The vocabulary matches, the mediational proposition matches, the sequence of noticing and examining and responding matches the two clauses where the corpus says the practitioner's work actually sits. Only the content at each node has changed.

That is what the CBT run established at the doctrinal level and what the HSA run found independently at the level of a single document's instructions: an agent can traverse the whole architecture, recognize every landmark, and arrive somewhere else.

VI. What This Does Not Establish

No claim of descent. Nothing here shows that CBT inherits from Epicureanism or that either inherits from anything. The three arrive at one profile independently, and the more likely explanation is that the profile is what a naturalistic account of the person converges on when it is built out into a complete system. That would be a claim about naturalism, not about lineage, and it is not yet demonstrated.

Three is not a series. Four runs, three of one type and one of another, is enough to rule out the instrument-artifact hypothesis and not enough to establish a general result.

The Reid run is provisional. No Reid primary text was opened. The two findings that carry the most weight in Section IV — the C2 and C3 Partial Convergence residuals — are exactly the sort of claim a reading of the Essays could overturn.

One adversarial test was run in the whole series. The Beckian C5 shift was constructed and refused with printed grounds. No comparable case was built against any of the twelve Divergent findings. A Divergent finding that has never had a case made against it is less secure than one that has survived a case.

No verdict outside the instrument's reach. Nothing here bears on whether CBT is clinically effective, whether Marxism explains anything about history, or whether Epicurean practical advice is sound. The findings concern what each system's presuppositions require and what an agent adopting it as a governing self-description has thereby accepted.

VII. What Would Test It

The template makes a prediction, and the prediction is checkable by further calibration runs.

Thomism should return a Reid-shaped profile: shared architecture, shared content-kind, first-order disagreement. If it returns the naturalist profile, the template is not tracking what this report says it tracks.

Humean sentimentalism should return the naturalist profile but arrive there by a different route — no materialist ontology of the soul doing the work, and the C3 and C6 divergences carried by the sentiment thesis alone. If it does, the template is separable from naturalism about substance.

Kantian ethics is the sharpest test, because it should break the profile in a specific direction: a system with a non-empirical account of the will and a foundational moral law, but a constructivist rather than realist account of moral fact. If it returns a mixed profile belonging to neither group, the instrument is measuring six things rather than one. If it collapses into either group, something is being flattened.

The first of these is also the cheapest, and Thomism has the further advantage of being independently checkable against corpus material already held.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

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