By this point in the series, the structure of theoretical pathology should be clear. It is not a matter of isolated mistakes, bad incentives, or insufficient ingenuity. It is a coherent pattern — one that reorganises how theory relates to success, meaning, and critique.
The question that naturally follows is whether such pathologies can be fixed.
The uncomfortable answer is: not from within the pathological frame itself.
Why more of the same does not help
When a theory has lost the cut between possibility and instance, no amount of additional work inside the theory can restore it.
More mathematics deepens internal coherence but does not generate contact. More data, when it arrives, is either reinterpreted to fit the framework or declared irrelevant to its fundamental aims. Better instruments merely push the point of contact further away, indefinitely deferred to future scales, energies, or resolutions.
These responses are not evasive strategies adopted in bad faith. They are structurally appropriate moves given the frame in which the theory now operates.
Within a pathological regime, every solution reproduces the problem.
Why internal critique cannot succeed
Because the standards of success have been replaced, internal critique has no leverage.
Arguments about empirical adequacy presuppose that instantiation matters. Arguments about explanation presuppose that phenomena constrain meaning. Arguments about prediction presuppose that risk has not been eliminated in advance.
But these presuppositions are precisely what the pathological framework no longer recognises.
Critique fails not because it is weak, but because it addresses a distinction the theory has already abandoned.
Diagnosis versus prescription
This is why this series has deliberately avoided offering a cure.
Methodological rules, exhortations to humility, or calls for renewed empiricism cannot repair a pathology whose defining feature is the erosion of the very distinctions such advice relies upon. To prescribe within the frame is already to accept its terms.
What can be done is diagnosis.
Diagnosis does not fix the pathology. It makes it visible.
What recovery would require
If recovery is possible at all, it cannot take the form of incremental improvement. It would require a structural reorientation of theory-making itself.
At minimum, this would involve restoring a distinction that has been doing quiet but indispensable work throughout the series:
the distinction between a theory as a structured space of possible instances, and
the actualisation of a phenomenon through a perspectival cut.
This distinction does not tell us which theories are true. It does not supply predictions or generate data. What it does is reintroduce a place where the world can resist theory.
Without that place, theory cannot fail — and a theory that cannot fail cannot be about anything.
The quiet role of ontology
Ontology enters here not as a metaphysical declaration, but as a condition of intelligibility.
An ontology that keeps theory and instance distinct does not constrain theoretical imagination. It constrains what counts as achievement. It prevents possibility from masquerading as actuality, and mathematics from being mistaken for a world.
This is not a return to naïve realism, nor a rejection of abstraction. It is a refusal to allow symbolic systems to exhaust the meaning of reality.
An ending without closure
The purpose of this series has not been to adjudicate specific debates or to single out particular programmes for blame. It has been to make visible a pattern that recurs whenever theory becomes too successful at surviving without the world.
Theoretical pathologies persist because they are comfortable. They reward intelligence, coordinate communities, and protect themselves linguistically. They do not collapse under their own weight.
But neither do they lead anywhere.
If this diagnosis has done its work, it should leave the reader slightly uneasy — less certain that sophistication guarantees contact, and more attentive to the quiet distinctions on which theory depends.
That unease is not a solution.
It is the condition under which recovery might someday become thinkable.
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