Rigor Guide
How TOE-Share reviews first-principles derivations
A first-principles derivation starts from a minimal condition and tracks what follows through necessity — not through curve-fitting to data, and not by proposing a mechanism among several candidates. TOE-Share’s review panel assigns this category when a submission’s central claim is “given this minimal premise, X must follow,” even if the derivation later produces physical or mathematical structure as a downstream consequence.
What This Category Is Not
A physical theory
Proposes a mechanism or entity within an already-assumed physical ontology and is judged on whether it predicts something checkable about nature.
A model
Represents selected relations inside a domain that's already been defined, without claiming those relations are forced.
A theorem
Proves a result inside an already-accepted axiom system — checkable by recomputation, not by tracing necessity back to a minimal premise.
What the Structural Warrant Score Means
TOE-Share’s falsifiability dimension normally asks whether a theory makes a prediction reality could contradict. That question is well-posed for a physical theory. It is not the right question for a derivation whose claim is upstream of any physical or empirical content: the logical condition being tracked isn’t made more or less true by an experiment.
So for this category, the same underlying question TOE-Share always asks — “how could this be shown wrong?” — gets answered with the instrument that actually applies: necessity. A derivation is shown wrong the same way any logical argument is shown wrong — by exhibiting a step that doesn’t actually follow, or an excluded alternative that wasn’t actually excluded. The score measures how completely the submitted text demonstrates its claimed chain under its own premises and terms. It does not estimate truth and does not produce an approve/revise/reject verdict or change publication state.
Reconstruction Comes Before Scoring
The panel first builds an ordered structural trace: the central claim, starting condition, author-defined terms, load-bearing transitions, dependencies, explicit closures, and downstream claims. A separate model audits that trace for imported premises, substituted terminology, missed closures, and reversed dependencies.
If the panel cannot establish a faithful trace after one corrective retry, the review is inconclusive. It produces no score, no verdict, no status change, and consumes no review credit. Reviewer uncertainty is never converted into an author penalty.
The Six-Score Profile
Internal Consistency
Are the author's premises, definitions, distinctions, and dependencies used coherently across the trace?
Structural Validity
Does each transition use only what the text has already made available?
Structural Warrant
How strongly does the text show that its central result is forced by what precedes it?
Trace Completeness
Is the central chain sufficiently exposed to audit relative to the work's stated scope?
Clarity
Can the intended reader follow the author's own terms, sequence, and scope?
Novelty
Does the work present a meaningfully new derivational structure or synthesis?
Every deduction must name an audited trace step, its source location, and the structural finding involved. No location means no score effect.
Common Ways Structural Warrant Remains Unresolved
A transition asserts "and so we get X" while another outcome remains live under the work's own stated conditions.
Necessity is claimed by analogy or intuition ("naturally," "it follows that") rather than by argument.
The paper never states why the derivation stops where it does — why this is the closing structure and not an intermediate one.
A downstream physical or mathematical representation is used as an unstated premise of the upstream derivation.
How to Expose More Structural Warrant
At each major transition, name the minimal premise being used and close any alternative that remains available under the work's stated conditions.
Make closure explicit: say why the chain of necessity terminates at this structure rather than continuing or landing elsewhere.
Keep the necessity argument separate from its downstream applications — a strong derivation can still have weakly-supported applications, and conflating them muddies both scores.
If a step compresses several transitions into one, expand it. A compressed step reads as an assumption even when the author intends it as forced.
The Category Is Assigned by the Panel, Not Chosen by the Author
You can’t tag your own submission as a derivation to dodge a weak falsifiability score — the review panel classifies the central claim from its content and separately types downstream derivational, formal, empirical, and interpretive claims. Classification splits remain visible, can be challenged, and are not treated as a paper defect.