A research program on how records stay the same, or stop being the same, as they change, built on a foundation that makes no causal or normative claims of its own.

Structural Explainability (SE) is a research program on how a record stays the same thing, or stops being it, as it changes: forks, revisions, merges, replications, a body of law like 40 CFR whose parts change while the whole persists. People mostly agree on these verdicts in practice. The aim is to find out how they decide, and to write the rules down explicitly enough that two defensible rules can be compared and their disagreement traced to specific commitments, instead of being buried in an identifier.

The foundation is a neutral substrate, designed to be pre-causal and pre-normative. It makes no causal or normative claims of its own; such claims can enter only as attributed assertions with a source. Parties who disagree about cause or responsibility can therefore still share the same records. This foundation is formalized in Lean under stated assumptions.

What is open is which kinds of things need distinct identity treatment, and why they must differ. That remains active research. Papers, specifications, and other repositories written before this work may use an older inventory of kinds and are being revised as the theory settles.

SE keeps structural commitments separate from the claims built on them. The foundation records identity, structure, transformation, and change; interpretive claims sit above it, each attributed to a source.

Structural Explainability is not anti-interpretation; it is anti-implicit interpretation. Interpretation is welcome when it is stated, attributed, and open to dispute, so disagreement remains explicit, attributable, and contestable over time.

SE supports independently developed accounts of identity and change without requiring a single authority, ontology, or interpretation.

Lean 4 formalizations of SE concepts, relationships, and mathematical results.

Each repository owns its definitions, scientific claims, evidence, implementation, documentation, and release information.

Independent (leaf) theories require no other SE theory repository:

Dependent and integrative theories are built on other theories. Deps lists direct SE theory dependencies, excluding transitive dependencies.

NS=neutral substrate, PS=persistence, TR=transformation, IND=individuation, IR=identity regimes.

Research papers develop and communicate the scientific and mathematical foundations of Structural Explainability.

Formal claims and their verification should be evaluated against the authoritative sources identified within each research repository.

Research pilots evaluate the applicability, explanatory value, and limitations of SE concepts against concrete cases and external evidence.

These repositories provide executable constructions, independent checks, or domain-specific verification.

Shared specifications, contracts, registries, and tools support consistency and traceability across repositories.

These repositories apply SE structures and mapping concepts to external domains and information systems.

Government-source repositories and other domain resources are available through the organization repository index.

Structural Explainability develops through related but distinct activities:

• Papers develop and communicate scientific arguments.
• Theory repositories formalize definitions, assumptions, and mathematical consequences.
• Research pilots investigate whether proposed concepts apply faithfully to independently documented cases.
• Verification repositories examine specified formal, algorithmic, or implementation properties.
• Research protocols govern source analysis, adversarial review, and scientific acceptance.

For example, se-theory-individuation develops formal constructions concerning individuation, while se-pilot-individuation-comparison investigates the source-grounded comparison of individuation accounts.