The Language of Stress: What This Theory Is Not

A framework that sounds like several existing accounts, and that uses a word — stress — already carrying a different technical meaning, needs to say plainly what it is not. This document does that, one boundary at a time.Some of the confusions are terminological. The Language of Stress is not a theory of psychological stress in the Selye or Lazarus sense, and the word is being used for something else entirely. Others are structural. It is not affective labeling, where valence is assigned to states after the fact; not reinforcement learning, where value is a scalar reward signal to be maximized; not predictive processing reframed, though the overlap is substantial and the document says exactly where; not global workspace theory, not integrated information theory, not functionalism, not illusionism, not panpsychism, and not reductive materialism. Each boundary states what the other account holds before saying how this one differs, so that a reader can check whether the characterization is fair.The document is not only defensive. Several entries concede more than they claim. The comparison with predictive processing grants that the two frameworks share most of their ground, and the entry on existing theories concedes that others reached similar conclusions first -- Mark Solms in particular made an identity claim before this one, grounded it anatomically, and argued it from evidence this framework does not have.Two boundaries are about the framework's own status rather than its neighbours. It is not complete: its central construct has no validated measure, and constructing one is the principal outstanding task. And it is not established, tested, or reviewed. That last entry is the most important in the document, and it exists so that nobody has to discover it later.The document closes with a canonical boundary statement, intended as the short form any other text in the corpus can point at.Read this if you suspect the framework is something you have already encountered under another name. It is where that question gets answered directly, including in the cases where the answer is partly yes.