General Theory of Cognitive Structuring

The General Theory of Cognitive Structuring develops an architectural framework for describing how cognitive systems sustain, regulate, access, represent, and reorganize structured conditions of processing. Rather than reducing cognition to a single state variable, objective function, processing sequence, or mechanism, the theory integrates a set of formally distinct constructions concerning configuration and stability, regulatory burden and retained history, discrepancy access and representation, structural transformation and compression, identity-related regulation, and multi-system coordination. The central contribution of the framework is typed integration. It preserves the domains, partiality conditions, status distinctions, and inferential boundaries of its component constructions while specifying how they may be used within a common architectural description. Coherence deviation is kept distinct from regulatory burden; signalization from admission; differentiated access from representation; structural admissibility from realized updating; configuration-level identity stabilization from regulatory identity attraction and transition-level identity continuity; and cross-system representation transfer from coordination sufficiency and conflict classification. Relations between layers require explicit interfaces rather than being inferred from their coexistence in the same theory. Within this framework, cognitive structuring is the constrained organization and possible reorganization of conditions under which configurations are sustained, discrepancies become accessible, representations are constructed, regulatory states develop historically, and architectural changes may be evaluated and realized. The theory does not claim that all cognitive systems share one metric, implementation, causal graph, objective function, or temporal sequence. Application to biological, artificial, social, or other concrete systems requires separately specified bridge assumptions, operationalizations, and empirical support.