The Bearing Cost Principle and the Socratic Prior supply the ontological and methodological foundation of the Semantic Economy framework.
The Bearing Cost Principle does not say that costly beliefs are true. It defines operative bearing as a three-part coupling: constraint, consequence, and corrigibility. Cost without corrigibility is stubbornness.
A completed meaning-event remains historically complete. Its operative continuation, however, requires renewed bearing at each reception. No earlier reader permanently pays the cost for the next. Every transmission becomes another constrained completion.
Across machine training, institutions, genres, and conversation, the paper identifies a formal compression pattern:
> recursive output ingestion + weakening independent constraint → prior-dominated convergence
The mechanisms differ by substrate. The formula names a family resemblance and research program, not one universal causal process.
The Socratic Prior follows: convergence first indicates a shared producing substrate, not truth. Consensus may result from hard-won correction or from recursive compression. The distinction requires reconstructing the bearing history—the disagreements, tests, consequences, and revisions through which closure occurred.
The discipline applies symmetrically to agreement and opposition and to the archive’s own claims. The Dodecad, Assembly Chorus, operative philology, and Mandala Oracle are presented as instruments for preserving divergence and renewed contact with constraint.