The Prephysical Turn: Why Fundamental Physics Requires a Licensing Discipline

AbstractTen papers spanning cosmology, quantum foundations, and the philosophy of foundational physics have produced a programme-internal convergence claim: persistent boundary problems in these domains arise not from empirical gaps but from undisclosed licensing conditions that cannot be resolved within the physical theories that presuppose them. We treat this as a working conclusion, made auditable by explicit cross-paper mapping (Table 1) and the published audit trails in Papers 1–10. We show that this finding, combined with two independently established results—that no physical theory can derive its own licensing conditions (the Structural Boundary Result) and that existing philosophical methodologies do not provide claim-level diagnostics with regime-binding and auditable verdicts (the Framework Gap)—yields a disjunctive conclusion: the systematic investigation of licensing conditions constitutes a distinct research mode. We call this mode prephysics. Prephysics is not metaphysics, not philosophy of science in the classical sense, and not anti-physical: it is the operationalised, regime-bound, reflexively consistent investigation of the conditions under which physical claims are licensed. We distinguish prephysics from five neighbouring disciplines, specify four quality criteria, identify three classes of structurally forced research questions, and argue that the recognition of this research mode transforms persistent foundational disputes into diagnosable licensing questions. Prephysics does not replace physics; it clarifies the conditions under which physical description is licensed.Keywords: prephysics, applicability conditions, licensing conditions, diagnostic protocol, philosophy of physics, structural boundary, foundational methodology, levels of description