The Benefits, Universality and Limits of DSRP Theory: Part 3 of 3

15 Dec 2025

DSRP is one of the most useful frameworks I know for improving thinking.

But “useful” is not the same as “true at every scale.”

In this final post, I push DSRP to its edge-cases—because if a framework claims universality, the only honest test is to take it to the limit and see where it breaks.

Part 3. The Limits of DSRP Theory

The goal is not to dismiss the theory, but to highlight where it may fall short. By doing so, I also hope to encourage readers to think about how these limits could be addressed, or how their impact might be reduced in practice.

3.1. Multiple internally coherent DSRP maps can disagree about what exists:

The first limitation is that DSRP can help multiple people “map reality” and still leave them with incompatible ontologies. They can make different claims about what exists.

The reason is simple. DSRP organizes thought. It helps us make distinctions, define parts, describe relationships, and compare perspectives. But DSRP does not, by itself, tell us which distinctions match the world at a fundamental level.

Two people can produce coherent DSRP maps that fit the same evidence, yet contradict each other.

It might be tempting to say “reality is the sum of all explanations.” But that fails when the explanations clash. If two explanations describe incompatible states of affairs, they cannot both be true.

The quantum measurement problem is a useful illustration of underdetermination in practice.

Quantum theory is extraordinarily predictive. Yet there is no agreement on what the formalism means. What is the wavefunction? What produces definite outcomes?

DSRP can clarify the debate. It can separate the key distinctions: wavefunction as real vs wavefunction as information; observer as physical system vs observer as agent; collapse as physical process vs belief update. It can also lay out the major interpretations side by side.

But the interpretations are not just different “views” of the same reality. They disagree about what exists and what happens.

That is where DSRP reaches its limit.

DSRP can help us understand the options, but the selection problem is handled by epistemic criteria and new tests, not by DSRP alone.

This is not uniquely a DSRP problem. And DSRP doesn’t claim to adjudicate between theories.

So I conclude that DSRP is a cognitive tool.

It can improve how we think and communicate. But it has a clear limit. It can organize competing explanations, but it can’t adjudicate between them. When rivals become experimentally distinguishable, empirical tests (and broader epistemic criteria) do the adjudicating - not DSRP.

3.2. The Cabreras attempt to elevate an abstract descriptive framework into ontology:

In their paper titled The Grammar of reality, Derek and Laura Cabrera write: (1)

“DSRP does not describe how we think about reality—it describes how reality is.”

The paper contains multiple statements that aim to elevate DSRP into ontology.

Here’s another quote that illustrates this:

“DSRP isn’t just how you organize your thoughts. It’s how reality organizes itself. Once that insight lands, it changes what DSRP is.

It stops being a model for better thinking, and starts being a model for how being arises. That’s the shift from cognition to ontology.”

Their argument for making this claim is that DSRP has become one of the most scientifically supported theories in systems thinking with over 90 distinct empirical studies that the four patterns are observable in physical, biological, and social systems.

I quote the authors’ characterization of the empirical studies:

“A 2020 meta-synthesis reviewed over 130 papers and 63 empirical studies confirming the independent presence of DSRP structures across diverse fields including neuroscience, microbiology, ethology, and developmental psychology—suggesting that the same cognitive patterns that structure thought also underlie the organization of reality itself.” (1)

(The above is the authors’ summary of the literature they cite.)

Reading this paper reminded me of “everything is mathematics” arguments.

The move is similar: a framework that is extremely useful for describing reality is promoted into a claim about what reality is.

The Cabreras make that move explicitly. They write that DSRP is “not […] a metaphorical or epistemic model, but […] a structural ontology,” and call it “a recursive, generative pattern by which reality organizes itself across scale.”

They also say the “shift from cognition to ontology […] is […] empirical,” and claim many studies show DSRP reflects both mind and world.

There are three different theses the Cabreras could mean here:

DSRP is a universal grammar of sense-making
DSRP is structural realism (reality has DSRP-like structure)
DSRP is generative ontology (DSRP structure constrains what can exist and yields novel consequences)

The paper’s language (“how being arises”, “core ontological force”, “This isn’t metaphysics. This is physics”) reads like (3), which carries a much higher burden of proof.

The ontological conclusion is not yet warranted by the evidence offered because:

First, co-implication and simultaneity dynamics explain why structure must appear in any description of reality, not why physical regularities exist.

An ontology must explain why some structures are physically realized and persist while others are not. DSRP explains why structure is unavoidable in representation, not why this universe has the particular stable laws it does.

Second, calling DSRP “generative” does not explain how anything in the world is produced or constrained.

If DSRP is only a necessary schema any description must instantiate, then it does not follow that DSRP is what reality is - only that it is a constraint on descriptions. The paper’s ontological phrasing overreaches what ‘necessary-for-description’ can justify.

Co-implication and simultaneity describe how DSRP elements and patterns depend on one another, not how physical systems come to exist or behave. If DSRP patterns were truly generating how reality organizes itself, DSRP theory would need to specify the physical processes through which this generation occurs.

While the Cabreras appeal to established theories from other fields (for example, Quantum Mechanics or Evolution), it remains unclear how DSRP, as an ontological theory, deepens those theories, abstracts them in a principled way, or resolves any of their foundational problems - such as the origin of life - rather than simply redescribing them in DSRP terms.

Third, the ontology claim is under-constrained.

DSRP allows indefinitely many equally valid decompositions through alternative distinctions, system boundaries, relationships, and perspectives.

If every possible outcome can always be redescribed as DSRP, then DSRP does not explain why anything exists in the particular form it does. A framework that accommodates all possibilities explains none in particular.

For these reasons, DSRP is best understood as a cognitive grammar for sense-making, not as the ontological structure of reality itself.

At most, the evidence supports DSRP as a candidate for a universal grammar of description and sense-making.

3.3. What should an ontological claim add?

Ontological claims must add constraint.

If DSRP is the structure of reality (not just a universal grammar of description), then it should rule out some possibilities - i.e., imply that some world-structures are impossible or less plausible without extra assumptions.

But DSRP is compatible with indefinitely many incompatible decompositions (different distinctions, boundaries, relationships, and perspectives), so it does not on its own constrain what exists in any particular way.

A descriptive grammar can be universal and still be non-committal. But an ontology that claims to be ‘how reality works’ must restrict degrees of freedom.

So the question isn’t whether DSRP can describe many outcomes - it can. The question is whether DSRP forbids any physically possible state-of-affairs, or forces any non-trivial regularity, without importing domain theory.

Criteria: Name one physically meaningful structure DSRP rules out (without importing extra domain assumptions).

3.4. An ontological layer should provide explanatory or predictive novelty:

If DSRP is a structural ontology, it should let us derive non-trivial consequences we would not otherwise expect, or unify existing theories in a way that reduces free parameters or resolves open disputes.

As presented, DSRP mainly re-describes domain theories in DSRP terms; it does not generate their equations, mechanisms, or testable constraints.

Criteria: Name one new quantitative prediction or discriminating observation DSRP yields.

3.5. What Particle Physics reveals about DSRP's limits:

The following image shows the Standard Model of particle physics:

The Standard Model is our best-tested framework for describing known elementary particles and three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak, and strong). It does not include gravity, and it does not explain major features of the universe such as dark matter. (2)

Within its domain, the Standard Model treats quarks and leptons as elementary. So far, experiments have found no confirmed evidence that they have smaller constituents. (3)

Some proposals, like String Theory, suggest a deeper layer. But there is still no direct experimental confirmation, and it is widely recognized that clear tests are hard at accessible energies.

This is a stress test for DSRP.

A common cognitive move is to seek deeper explanation via further decomposition. Particle physics shows decomposition can stall empirically and that progress often comes from new primitives, not just ‘smaller parts’. (3)

That is a hard limit for a parts-first style of thinking. At that boundary, DSRP can still organize what we know. But it cannot push us past the boundary. It cannot tell us what the next primitives are, or whether there even is a “next layer.” Only new physics and new tests can do that.

If you want other examples, time and space work too.

This is a limit on decomposition given current evidence, not proof that reality has no deeper layer.

DSRP can help us organize what the Standard Model says (entities, symmetries, interactions, perspectives like ‘effective field theory vs fundamental’), but it doesn’t generate the Standard Model’s mathematics or its testable predictions. That requires domain theory.

3.6. The Problem with a DSRP Quantum Ontology:

In The Grammar of reality, the Cabreras try to ‘quantize’ DSRP by using quantum language to turn DSRP from a thinking tool into a quantum ontology.

A key step in that move is their treatment of identity. They repeatedly describe identity as a “statistical cloud” and even tell the reader: “You are not a thing. You are a cloud.”

They then tie this to quantum language by claiming that “the act of observation changes what is” and calling Perspective a “core ontological force”. They explicitly compare this to “collapsing the cloud” in quantum measurement.

This is the point where I’m not persuaded by the move to proverbially “quantize DSRP.”

As I was looking for a clean way to express my objections, I found this discussion helpful:

Quantum foundations supports multiple mutually incompatible ontological theories, so we should not expect a single final story of “what it’s really made of.”
You can’t step outside your model to check ontology directly; you compare frameworks by explanatory power and predictive success, not by matching metaphysics to “reality-in-itself.”
‘Observation changes what is’ is interpretation-loaded, not uniquely forced by the formalism.

So the issue isn’t using DSRP to talk about quantum theory. The issue is treating that fit as evidence that DSRP is the ontology - exactly where quantum theory supports multiple rival ontologies.

Quantum theory is a bad place to infer a single ontology from a convenient description.

Criteria: Use DSRP to rule out at least one major rival ontology in quantum foundations.

Burden of Proof

If the claim is (A) “DSRP is a universal grammar of description,” then the evidence offered is relevant.
If the claim is (B) “DSRP is an ontology of reality” (how being arises; perspective as ontological force), then the same evidence is insufficient: it shows cross-domain fit, not ontological constraint.
To justify (B), DSRP must do at least one of the following without importing extra domain theory:
1. Rule out some possible world-structures,
2. Derive non-trivial consequences we wouldn’t otherwise expect, or
3. Discriminate between rival ontologies via distinctive predictions.

Conclusion

My conclusion is simple: treat DSRP as a cognitive tool with real value.

Use it to build better explanations. But don’t let its universality as a method turn into a universality claim about being without the extra burden that such a claim must carry.

References

The Grammar of reality, May 2025, Derek Cabrera; Laura Cabrera
The Standard Model, CERN
Searches for Quark and Lepton Compositeness, May 2024

Thank you for reading. If any errors or misunderstandings appear in this article, they are entirely my own and should not be attributed to Derek and Laura Cabrera or their work.

Conversation with Derek Cabrera

Mr. Cabrera was kind enough to read this post and respond to me. Below was our conversation:

Message 1: Benjamin contacts Derek and Laura Cabrera for comments

Hi Derek and Laura,

I’ve just published a three-part series on the benefits, universality, and limits of DSRP Theory. If you’re open to it, I’d really value your thoughts on Part 3 in particular, where I engage critically with some of your recent scientific papers.

If you’re interested, I’d also welcome a conversation - happy to discuss where you think my critique misses the mark, and where it might point to useful refinements or open questions.

https://www.benjamin-mosse.com/2025/12/15/universality-and-the-limits-of-dsrp-theory-part-3.html

Thank you for considering it.

Kindest regards, Benjamin

Message 2: Derek responds to Benjamin

I want to start by saying I love and welcome critical engagement — especially when a theory makes bold claims. That’s appropriate, healthy, and necessary. Where we often go wrong, though, is how critique is applied.

Good science doesn’t start with critique. It starts with deep systemic understanding. Steel-man first. Then critique. And only then, if necessary, rejection. Critique without first demonstrating structural comprehension isn’t rigor — it’s just skepticism.

That standard matters even more today because we’re operating in an unusual epistemic moment. In the age of AI, the world’s information is effectively at our fingertips, and it’s now possible to generate relatively thorough — though often incomplete — analyses of almost any paper or theory very quickly. That makes breadth easy. What it does not guarantee is ecological understanding: awareness of the full body of related work, the developmental trajectory of the theory, and the interdependence of results across papers, methods, and domains. For theories making ontological claims, that ecology matters.

In practice, theorists who work every day within a theory have often heard criticism X before and, as a result, pursued experiments or written proofs to resolve it. That work may live in a narrower or less visible paper that a critic (or an AI) simply doesn’t have loaded — and therefore doesn’t appear in the critique. My suggestion is simple: ask the scholar for the ecology of papers that “complete the circle,” load all of them into AI (or read them), and then see what critique you or the AI has. I’m happy to do this — though it would be somewhat comical to see what happens when the same standard is applied consistently to other theories in the arena.

This matters because in science we are almost never saying “theory X is perfect.” What we might say, if we’re lucky, is “theory X is better than the alternatives.” I am confident in that claim here — based on the evidence.

That standard matters even more because DSRP makes explicit ontological claims. Those claims should raise the bar. But that bar has to be applied consistently.

For example, if we applied the same ontological, predictive, and falsifiability standards being invoked here to other proposed ontologies or thinking frameworks — including classical philosophical ontologies, modern analytic or process ontologies (e.g., Aristotle’s or Kant’s Categories, Husserl’s phenomenology, Whitehead’s process philosophy, Quine, Bunge’s formal ontology, ontic structural realism, mereology, and other forms of process metaphysics), or the dominant systems-thinking frameworks (e.g., SD, CST, VSM, Cynefin, GST) — most would fail immediately on multiple fronts. Many make no necessity claims, provide no minimal axioms, specify no falsification conditions, and offer no cross-domain entailment logic. So critique is welcome — but it must be symmetrical.

That said, I love a good fight and I’m happy to take the heat, even when it isn’t applied to “competing” theories. And for context: you will not find anyone more critical of DSRP than me. I know exactly where its warts are.

It’s also important to be precise about what kind of theory this is. DSRP is not “just philosophy.” It has a substantial empirical literature demonstrating effects: controlled studies show that explicit use of DSRP produces measurable improvements in systems thinking, metacognition, learning transfer, problem solving, and related outcomes. That alone places it beyond most so-called “thinking frameworks.” You are also right that my claims go beyond thinking and into ontology.

At the same time, DSRP is not a domain-specific causal theory competing with physics or biology. It is a structural ontology. Structural ontologies do not adjudicate between rival empirical theories; they specify the conditions under which any coherent identity, model, or theory can exist at all. Logic doesn’t tell you which hypothesis is true either — but that doesn’t make logic merely descriptive.

With that framing, here is a concise response to the specific issues raised.

(1) “DSRP is descriptive, not adjudicative.”

Correct — and that is a feature, not a flaw. The same is true of logic, mathematics, information theory, evolution, and other structural theories: they do not judge which empirical claims are true or which hypotheses should be accepted. Instead, they constrain what can be coherently described, modeled, tested, or explained in the first place.

DSRP operates at that same structural level. It does not replace empirical testing or adjudicate between competing explanations. What it does do — and does extremely well — is diagnose structural coherence. Because it is neutral with respect to content, values, and conclusions, it can reliably expose internally incoherent structures: missing distinctions, broken or circular relationships, collapsed systems, unacknowledged perspectives, and other forms of structural instability. In practice, this often makes incoherent or untenable models visible very quickly — not because DSRP “disagrees,” but because the structure itself does not hold together. Importantly, this diagnosis can be done predictably and consistently in computational models, not merely in the minds of human users.

That neutrality is precisely what makes DSRP objective. It constrains intelligibility without dictating outcomes. It identifies when a model cannot possibly work as structured, while leaving empirical adjudication — what is actually the case — to domain-specific evidence and testing. Most importantly, awareness of the subjectivity of reference framing (perspective) is built into the ontology itself — the closest approximation to objectivity we have.

(2) “Universality doesn’t imply ontology.”

Agreed in general. But the claim here is not inductive (“it appears everywhere”). It is entailment-based: identity cannot exist without Distinction, System, Relationship, and Perspective. Remove any one and identity collapses into incoherence or indeterminacy. A single coherent counterexample would falsify the theory.

(3) “The necessity proof isn’t complete.”

After Enclosure (see paper), D, S, R, and P are derived as jointly necessary and jointly sufficient for identity, with an explicit argument for minimality (no fewer, no more). What remains is translation into different formal idioms for different audiences — not missing substance.

(4) “DSRP doesn’t predict.”

It doesn’t predict events — and this too is a feature, not a flaw, especially given the field’s near-total fixation on events and surface-level information. DSRP predicts underlying structural constraints and failure modes — the same kind of prediction made by logic, thermodynamics, information theory, and natural selection. Systems that suppress one or more of D, S, R, or P reliably produce brittleness, paradox, polarization, and breakdown. That prediction is falsifiable — and repeatedly confirmed.

(5) Falsifiability.

Remarkably, DSRP is relatively easy to falsify. It would be falsified by a single coherent identity that exists without Distinction, System, Relationship, or Perspective — without reintroducing them at a higher level of description. No such example has been produced. One would end the theory immediately. This is the same entailment-based falsifiability we see in theories like evolution.

(7) “The claims are too bold / adoption is uneven.”

Boldness — and the pace or pattern of adoption — is not itself a critique of a theory. In science, uptake is a sociological variable, not a truth condition. The history of science shows that even well-supported theories can diffuse unevenly, especially when they are foundational, cross-disciplinary, or challenge established evaluative norms.

That said, it’s worth noting that DSRP has in fact seen substantial adoption across education, organizational practice, systems training, and applied research. Its use in classrooms, leadership development, military and intelligence contexts, therapy, AI, and empirical studies demonstrates that the theory is neither marginal nor purely speculative. At the same time, like any theory operating at the level of ontology, its diffusion is necessarily slower and more uneven than domain-specific tools. ? What matters scientifically is not whether a theory is comfortable, familiar, or universally adopted, but whether it is coherent, falsifiable, empirically grounded, and explanatory relative to the alternatives. On those criteria, DSRP stands or falls independently of its current adoption curve. Uptake can inform relevance and utility, but it does not adjudicate validity.

Some of this is necessarily technical. Structural ontologies operate upstream of familiar empirical theories, and that takes work to see clearly. But the burden cuts both ways: if we’re going to critique claims at that level, we owe them not just surface familiarity, but engagement with the full ecology of evidence — empirical studies, formal results, proofs, and how they fit together over time.

In short: critique is not only welcome — it’s necessary. But it should be systemic before critical, applied symmetrically, and grounded in what has actually been demonstrated — empirically and structurally — not just what can be quickly assembled from isolated sources.

Message 3: Benjamin responds to Derek

Hi Derek,

Thank you for responding.

I want you to know I have read your work in the Journal of Systems Thinking and elsewhere, including the DSRP Primer. The papers I leaned on most for the ontology question were The Grammar of Reality, The Unified Calculus of Organization, Structure, Emergence, and Meaning: The Patterns that Connect Mind and Nature, and O Theory: The Science of Organization.

I also wrote Parts 1 and 2 to present DSRP in its strongest form.

https://www.benjamin-mosse.com/2025/12/14/universality-and-the-limits-of-dsrp-theory-part-1.html

https://www.benjamin-mosse.com/2025/12/14/universality-and-the-limits-of-dsrp-theory-part-2.html

Based on your reply, here is what I think we agree on: DSRP is descriptive, not adjudicative. And universality does not by itself establish ontology. When I say universality, I mean a universal grammar of description.

Regarding point (3), “The necessity proof isn’t complete”, I think there’s a misunderstanding. I agree with your response that explains the co-implication and simultaneity dynamics between the patterns/elements of DSRP Theory.

My point is that an ontological theory must meet the following criterion:

Rule out some possible world-structures,

Derive non-trivial consequences we wouldn’t otherwise expect, or

Discriminate between rival ontologies via distinctive predictions.

Regarding point (4), “DSRP doesn’t predict”, I don’t agree with changing the definition of what a “prediction” is in science. If DSRP is indeed an ontological theory, then it must be capable of making at least one new quantitative prediction.

I’ve not made reference to the following, so I’m not sure how to interpret these parts of your response:

(5) “Falsifiability”

(6) “The claims are too bold / adoption is uneven”

Thank you.

Benjamin

Message 4: Derek responds to Benjamin

Hi Benjamin,

I appreciate the engagement and the time you’ve taken with the work. That said, I think it’s worth noting that critiquing a theory at the level of ontology really does require loading the full technical and empirical ecology of that theory. Without that, it’s easy to end up debating definitions rather than results. Some additional training or deeper engagement with the later-stage work may be helpful before diving quite this far into the deep end. I would also suggest real skills training. Science is ultimately practical —it lets us do things we couldn’t otherwise do. The training camp belts will help you take your skills to a higher level and see how the science plays out ontologically—not in the abstract and philosophical sense of the term ontology but in the real world skills and results that are hard to argue with.

At some point, ontology debates have to terminate in evidence and comparison. That’s what we did. We evaluated the most widely used ontological frameworks — including Aristotle’s and Kant’s Categories, Husserlian phenomenology, Quinean ontology, Bunge’s formal ontology, ontic structural realism, mereology, and process metaphysics — against explicit, science-based criteria. That analysis is published, transparent, and open to challenge.

Under those criteria, DSRP performs better.

If someone disagrees, the scientific options are straightforward: challenge the criteria, challenge the scoring, or present an alternative ontology that performs better under explicit criteria.