Retroactive Completion Questions, Answers, Causes, and the Underdetermined World

Abstract

This project hosts the complete, signed edition (Version 1.12) of Retroactive Completion: Questions, Answers, Causes, and the Underdetermined World — an interdisciplinary monograph of roughly 76,000 words in eight Parts and six appendices — and serves as the work's public home for the record: timestamped registrations, the version history, and, if the program's empirical arm proceeds, the preregistrations to be run under the book's Replication Register proposal (Appendix F). The book defends a single structure in six domains — concepts, causes, questions, answers, physical values (carried under a speculative label), and law. In each, the identity of a thing outruns the resources that exist in advance for fixing it, and a later event completes it: not by discovering what the thing was all along, but by settling what it thereby becomes. Underdetermination is structure, not defect; completion is event, not precondition. The structure receives a general form (the co-underdetermination lemma), a shared negative argument (the hidden-fact posit is uneconomical in every domain), and a culmination: a theory of freedom on which the dilemma "either antecedently determined or mere luck" is false, because determination can be an achievement, and the achiever is the agent's own exploration. The book's stake in the age of artificial intelligence is what that age puts at risk: standing, not positions. The method is part of the argument, and it is deployed as public apparatus: every load-bearing claim appears in bold and is attackable; every external claim carries one of four stated evidential passports (verified at the point of use, verified via documented sources, flagged as unverified and never load-bearing, or the institutional-fact discipline for contemporaneous public events); corrections and citation debts are kept in public ledgers (Appendix D); the derivation map for the surrounding paper portfolio is stated once (Appendix C); and a bilingual glossary fixes the working terminology (Appendix A). The book was written by its author with an AI system as writing assistant under a verify-before-asserting rule that allows no identifier from memory; the making is declared in the book's closing statement, where the content slot is machine-assisted and the asking, keeping, and cutting are the author's acts. Deposits: the full manuscript (PDF and DOCX) and the companion pamphlet The Spine, Lifted (the book's thirty-two load-bearing theses, extracted under the book's own bold-sentence contract). Revisions, if any, will be deposited as new versioned records, each registration freezing one point in the version history. Companion works sharing this project's author (all publicly available on SSRN): The Responsibility Anchor; Floors and Ceilings; The Right to Clusion. The convergence is registered as evidence, and the boundary is maintained in both directions (§0.5 and Appendix C of the book).