If theoretical pathology has a single structural signature, it is the disappearance of a distinction that once organised the entire practice of theory-making.
That distinction is the cut between a theory and its instances.
When this cut is operative, a theory functions as a structured space of possible events. Its concepts, equations, and formalisms articulate what could occur, while remaining answerable to what does occur. Even highly abstract theories retain a sense of conditionality: if the world instantiates this structure, then certain phenomena should be observable.
Pathology begins when this cut quietly dissolves.
From possibility to actuality without passage
In healthy theory-building, the relation between theory and instance is not temporal but logical. A theory is not waiting to be realised in time; it is waiting to be actualised in experience. The passage from one to the other is not a process but a shift in perspective — from the articulation of possibility to the encounter with an event.
When this distinction is lost, the theory no longer appears as a theory of possible instances. Instead, it comes to be treated as a direct description of reality itself. Mathematical structures are spoken of as if they were already actual, already world-constituting, requiring no further moment of instantiation.
At this point, the question “where is the phenomenon?” begins to sound naïve, even illegitimate.
Mathematics as world
The missing cut manifests most clearly in the changing role of mathematics.
Originally, mathematical formalisms function as constraints on possibility. They tell us which patterns of variation are allowed, which transitions are coherent, which quantities can meaningfully be related. Mathematics, in this role, is profoundly powerful — but it is not yet a world.
In pathological contexts, mathematics ceases to operate as a theory of instances and begins to operate as a surrogate ontology. The formal structure itself is treated as the thing that exists, rather than as a specification of how something could exist.
This is not a confusion that happens all at once. It emerges through small, locally reasonable shifts:
equations are said to “describe reality” rather than constrain possibilities;
mathematical necessity is taken as a proxy for physical necessity;
internal consistency is allowed to substitute for empirical traction.
Each step feels harmless. Taken together, they erase the cut.
Worldless theories and instance-free explanation
Once the cut is gone, a distinctive pattern appears.
Theories continue to explain — but only other theoretical structures. Models illuminate models. Formulations motivate reformulations. Interpretations proliferate, not because there are too many phenomena to explain, but because there are too few.
What remains is explanation without instantiation.
This is why pathological theories often feel simultaneously rich and empty. Rich in structure, implication, and internal connection; empty in phenomenological consequence. The theory has become a closed symbolic ecology, capable of sustaining itself indefinitely.
Crucially, nothing internal to the system demands that contact be restored. Without the cut, there is no longer a place for instantiation to appear as a requirement rather than an optional extra.
Why critique fails
This structural shift explains a familiar frustration.
Critics point out the lack of empirical support, and are told that the mathematics is too deep to abandon. They ask what would count as falsification, and are answered with appeals to future technology, inaccessible scales, or principled observational limits. They question whether the theory explains anything observable, and are accused of lacking imagination.
These responses are not evasions. They are symptoms.
Once a theory is no longer organised around the theory–instance cut, empirical criticism simply addresses the wrong level. It presupposes a distinction the theory no longer recognises.
The quiet normalisation of the missing cut
Perhaps the most striking feature of this pathology is how unremarkable it has become.
Entire generations of theorists are trained within frameworks where instantiation is optional, deferred, or indefinitely postponed. Mathematical fertility is taken as evidence of depth. The absence of phenomena is reframed as a virtue: a sign that the theory operates at a more fundamental level than experience can currently reach.
In this environment, asking how a theory connects to events can feel almost antiquated — a residue of an earlier, less sophisticated science.
Yet it is precisely this question that once made theory possible.
What comes next
The missing cut is not the only mechanism of theoretical pathology, but it is the enabling one. Once it disappears, other dynamics follow almost inevitably: surrogate success, aesthetic capture, interpretative proliferation, and linguistic drift.
In the next part, I will focus on the first of these consequences — surrogate success — and show how theories learn to thrive by replacing contact with the world by internal markers of achievement.
At that point, pathology ceases to look like failure at all. It begins to look like progress.
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