Prolegomena
This is a working paper on what classifications such as "depression" are actually doing. Its point of departure is psychiatric diagnosis, especially the long conceptual movement from melancholy to nerves, depression, and Major Depressive Disorder. But the analysis is not only about psychiatry. The psychiatric case is used because it makes the problem unusually visible: a word that appears to describe suffering also stabilises it, routes it into institutions, authorises treatment, reorganises self-understanding, and changes what can happen next.
The paper is especially concerned with fourth-level recursivity, or L4. In Living Value Theory, L4 is the level at which articulations become actionable. A person may first say that life feels hollow, that getting out of bed has become impossible, or that nothing matters any longer. These are articulations. But when that field of distress is stabilised as "Major Depressive Disorder," something different has happened. The classification now enables decisions: prescriptions, insurance claims, clinical pathways, sick leave, research inclusion, legal recognition, and institutional action. The paper asks what kind of thing such a classification is, how it differs from ordinary description, and why ordinary language makes that difference so hard to see.
The title, The Anatomy of “Melancholy”, deliberately echoes Robert Burton’s great seventeenth-century work, while placing quotation marks around “melancholy” to mark a different problem. This paper is not offering another history of melancholy as a condition. It is trying to anatomise the classificatory form itself: what gets cut, compressed, stabilised, moved, disguised, or made actionable when a living field of distress is turned into a concept. The psychiatric diagnosis is therefore both the case and the clue. It reveals a broader problem in ordinary language classifications: some concepts merely describe, while others decide, but language often lets them look the same.
The paper mobilises a large number of LVT concepts: the five recursivity levels, the five mediations, mesocosmic fit, symbolic mode, inter-recursive domains. From there, the paper introduces a wide range of new concepts: mediational bandwidth, recursivity bandwidth, forced misarticulation, institutional stabilisation, and the trapdoor of ordinary language. I do not pause to explain every established LVT concept in full. Readers will need at least a basic grounding in Living Value Theory to follow the argument, especially the distinction between L3 articulation and L4 stabilisation. The aim here is not introductory exposition, but conceptual mapping.
This is also why the text remains a working paper. It has turned out to be exceptionally difficult to write. The difficulty is not simply technical. The paper is trying to classify classifications while using ordinary language, the very medium whose hidden operations it is trying to expose. The result is necessarily provisional. I am still rethinking several of the distinctions proposed here, especially the relation between mediational bandwidth and recursivity bandwidth, the status of “entity-like” disease concepts, and the precise ways in which L4 classifications redistribute interpretive authority. The paper should therefore be read less as a finished doctrine than as a map of a terrain that has only just become visible.
Abstract
L4 concepts do more than describe the world. They abstract from large numbers of particular cases into general categories, and the most consequential among them close fields of lived coordination into forms that license decision, classification, and institutional action. This article argues that ordinary language concepts carry multiple hidden properties that no word reveals: their symbolic mode, their level in the recursivity architecture, their mediational bandwidth, their recursivity bandwidth, and the recursivity status of the domain they govern. Taken together, these constitute the trapdoor of ordinary language: the systematic invisibility, specific to natural language symbolisation, of the most consequential properties of the concepts we use. A special case of this trapdoor is the concept that disguises its own level: Major Depressive Disorder is an L4 concept formatted to look like the naming of a bounded entity, on the model of disease concepts such as tuberculosis. This disguise conceals three things simultaneously: the arbitrariness of its decision threshold, the inter-recursive character of its domain, and the breadth of its mediational claims. The conceptual history of depression, from melancholia through neurasthenia and MDD, provides the article’s primary thread. A second thread is drawn from LVT analysis of a published psychiatric case, which is read as the clearest clinical illustration of what it looks like to apply L4 stabilisations lightly, provisionally, and always in answer to L3 detail. The article concludes with a diagnostic protocol and with mesocosmic humility as the appropriate orientation for those who use, design, or contest actionable concepts.
1. Introduction: Concepts That Do More Than Describe
Consider two statements about the same person in distress. The first: “she seems unable to get out of bed in the mornings, has lost interest in things she used to care about, and finds life without meaning.” The second: “she has Major Depressive Disorder.” Both concern the same person. But they do not do the same work. The first describes particular states available in immediate experience. The second abstracts from such particulars into a category that enables clinical decisions, pharmaceutical prescriptions, insurance claims, sick leave entitlements, legal proceedings, research trials, and institutional care pathways. The first is an articulation. The second is an institution.
Living Value Theory distinguishes five recursivity levels. The distinction this article is concerned with is the one between L3 and L4. At L3, concepts name and describe what is immediately available in the mesocosm: entities, states, events, and processes that can be indicated without further abstraction. At L4, concepts abstract from large numbers of such particulars into general categories. “Class,” “depression,” “tuberculosis,” and “economic disadvantage” are all L4 in this sense: each gathers a range of L3 descriptions under a single covering term. Not all L4 concepts are equally actionable in the consequential sense. Some are analytical tools with no direct decision implications. Others are explicitly designed to ground decisions: is this person depressed? If yes, treat. Is this worker in precarious employment? If yes, extend these protections. The most consequential L4 concepts are those of this latter type, and the rest of this article focuses on them.
The problem these concepts share is that ordinary language does not mark any of the properties that matter most about them. The word “depression” gives none of this away. Neither does “tuberculosis,” even though the two concepts operate across almost entirely different ontological territory. This systematic concealment is what the article calls the trapdoor of ordinary language.
The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 establishes the recursivity architecture. Section 3 develops the typology of what ordinary language hides. Section 4 develops mediational bandwidth and recursivity bandwidth using the contrast between Ricardo and Marx as the joint illustration for both. Section 5 establishes mesocosmic fit as the master criterion. Sections 6 and 7 analyse non-recursive and self-recursive domains, including the tuberculosis comparator and the Enlightenment binary. Section 8 analyses the deepest form of conceptual disguise. Sections 9 and 10 cover original misfit and hysteresis. Section 11 covers cultural, sequential, evaluative, and causal misfit. Section 12 analyses institutionalisation and the redistribution of recursivity, using the Denig-Lawrie case as the sustained illustration. Section 13 offers a diagnostic protocol. Section 14 concludes.
2. The Recursivity Architecture: From L1 to L5
Living Value Theory distinguishes five recursivity levels that are qualitatively different operations, not merely stages in a sequence.
At L1, there is coordinated being in the world: the ordinary condition of embodied and social life functioning well enough that neither mind nor body becomes an explicit problem. L1 is not a state one knows but a state one inhabits. The condition becomes visible only when it breaks down.
That breakdown is L2: the level of felt misalignment. Here something is wrong but not yet formed as a concept. A person describing what it is like to find suicide “comforting,” not as a theoretical position but as an embodied orientation predating any diagnostic framing, is operating at L2. So is the description of enduring life as “one stage up from rotten noodles” (Denig and Lawrie 2021). These are lived disturbances of coordination spanning embodiment, relationships, work, and daily endurance: the raw texture of misalignment before it has been converted into any symbolic form.
L3 begins when misalignments are articulated. The L3 level names and describes what is immediately available in the mesocosm: entities, states, and processes that can be indicated without further abstraction. A cough that keeps coming back at night, a labourer working at a particular mill, a feeling of heaviness in the morning, a piece of bread: these are L3 in this sense. L3 articulations open a field without closing it for decision.
L4 abstracts from many L3 particulars into a general category. “Tuberculosis” gathers the cough, the haemoptysis, the fever, and the night sweats under a single term. “Class” gathers many individual labourers and their conditions into a structural category. “Depression” gathers many reported experiences of low mood, disrupted sleep, and diminished pleasure. The move from L3 to L4 is always a move from particular to general, from immediate mesocosmic salience to abstracted category. This abstraction is necessary for any coordination across time, persons, and institutions. But it comes at a cost: the L4 category can no longer be pointed to directly in the mesocosm the way an L3 entity can.
Not all L4 concepts are equally actionable in the consequential sense. Some are analytical categories coined to organise theoretical understanding. Others are explicitly designed as decision concepts: they impose a threshold, and once a case falls on one side, a specific institutional response follows. The Enlightenment accelerated this second type by selecting binary L4 categories as the ground of scientific and political rationality. The decisive question became not “how much?” but “which side?”: does this phenomenon belong to nature or to culture? To the physician’s domain or to the priest’s? These binaries reorganised entire institutional architectures. Humoral pathology, by contrast, had many gradations and classifications but rarely a sharp binary with a clear therapeutic decision attached. The shift from humoral classification to binary biomedical diagnosis was partly a shift in the architecture of L4: from gradated description to decision threshold.
L5 is the level at which the handling of all prior levels is itself made an object of reflection. Living Value Theory operates at L5 when it asks what sort of domain a concept governs, what distortions arise when L2 misalignment is rushed into L4 stabilisation, and why existing frameworks have lacked a language for the recursive structure that generates these distortions.
3. What Ordinary Language Hides: A Typology of Concealment
Ordinary language concepts hide, systematically and without exception, the properties that matter most. This is structural, not incidental, and it applies specifically to ordinary language symbolisation rather than to other symbol systems. Numbers reveal their computational type in the symbol itself. Musical notation reveals register and duration. Technical diagrams confine themselves to a single domain. Ordinary language does none of this. It presents all concepts as if they were of the same logical type, requiring only attentiveness to their reference to be used correctly. The result is a permanent invitation to category error.
The concealment operates across five distinct dimensions.
The first concealment is symbolic mode. Ordinary language concepts operate in at least three distinct modes, and nothing in the word itself signals which is operative.
The first mode is mesocosmic coordination. “Pass me the salt” is the paradigm: the symbol is embedded in an immediate coordination, its success is directly verifiable, and it is not pointing toward any absence. The salt either gets passed or it does not. This mode is pervasive in everyday life and largely invisible to philosophical analysis precisely because it leaves no trace once the coordination has succeeded.
The second mode is reference to absence. “The cat is on the mat” as it appears in analytic philosophy is the paradigm: there is no real cat, no real mat. The sentence is being analysed as a pointing toward something not present, a representation of a possible state of affairs. What is striking is that analytic philosophy has constructed almost its entire theory of meaning around this mode, while failing to notice that the same sentence can also be a mesocosmic coordination (“don’t look for the cat, it’s on the mat”) or a re-presentation. The philosophers involved do of course belong to a real community with its own mesocosmic coordination: the practice of academic argument, seminar discussion, citation, and institutional affiliation. But within the theory of meaning they produce, this dimension is invisible. All symbols appear as references to absence.
The third mode is re-presentation. This is the moment when the symbol stops pointing toward an absence and becomes the thing itself. The Christian Eucharist is the paradigm: bread and wine do not represent or refer to the body and blood of Christ. They become them. The symbol is no longer a vehicle for absent meaning but a real presence. Re-presentation occurs wherever a symbol acquires the status of the reality it was supposed to indicate: in certain political ceremonies, in rituals of investiture, in the moment when a legal verdict stops being a description of guilt and constitutes it.
The same word can operate in all three modes. “Depression” as a felt description in conversation operates in mesocosmic coordination. “Depression” as the central term of a philosophical discussion of mental states operates as reference to absence. “Depression” as the grounds for a disability benefit claim acquires re-presentational force: the diagnosis is no longer pointing toward a condition, it constitutes a legal status.
The second concealment is recursivity level. A word does not reveal whether it is functioning at L3, L4, or L5. “Class” in Ricardo’s political economy and “class” in Marx’s revolutionary theory look identical. They are not, across both recursivity level and everything that follows from it. This is the subject of Section 4.
The third concealment is mediational bandwidth. A concept does not reveal how many of the five mediations it is attempting to stabilise. “Debt” is formally a multimaterial and multisymbolic concept. “Major Depressive Disorder” is formally a concept of embodied and multisymbolic states. But the functional bandwidth of each, what each concept is actually being asked to do in practice, is very different from its formal bandwidth. The gap between formal and functional bandwidth is a primary site of conceptual danger, and ordinary language conceals it entirely.
The fourth concealment is recursivity bandwidth. A concept does not reveal how many recursivity levels it spans or requires. Ricardo’s “class” is a purely structural L4 category that requires no self-application by the persons it classifies. Marx’s “class” spans from L2 felt misalignment through L3 articulation to L4 political category to L5 critique of ideological misrecognition. The same word, radically different spans.
The fifth concealment is domain recursivity status. A concept does not reveal whether the domain it governs is non-recursive (indifferent to being described), self-recursive (responsive through internal feedback), or inter-recursive (responsive through mutual interpretation and shared symbolisation). This is the deepest concealment, and it is the subject of Sections 6 through 8.
4. Ricardo, Marx, and the Two Dimensions of Bandwidth
The contrast between Ricardo’s “class” and Marx’s “class” provides the clearest joint illustration of mediational bandwidth and recursivity bandwidth, because the two concepts use the same word while differing across both dimensions simultaneously.
Ricardo’s “class” is a structural category defined by relation to the means of production: landowners receive rent, capitalists receive profit, labourers receive wages. It is an L4 abstraction from many particular economic positions. Its mediational bandwidth is narrow: the concept primarily stabilises the multimaterial dimension of economic life, the ownership of land and capital and the wage relation. It does not attempt to stabilise embodiment, being-with, dwelling, or multisymbolism as constitutive dimensions of class position. A labourer in Ricardo’s framework is defined by their structural position, not by their body, their relationships, their home, or their self-understanding. The concept is designed to enable economic analysis and policy, not to capture the full mesocosmic situation of the persons it classifies.
Ricardo’s “class” also has minimal recursivity bandwidth. It does not require self-application by the persons it classifies. A labourer does not need to understand themselves as a member of the labouring class for the concept to apply. The concept is used by the political economist to describe a structural position; the labourer’s own understanding of their situation is irrelevant to whether the classification holds. This is the hallmark of a concept with minimal recursivity bandwidth: it operates at L4 without requiring any movement through L2 or L3 by the persons it names.
Marx’s “class” is structurally different across both dimensions. Its mediational bandwidth spans all five mediations simultaneously. A labourer in Marx’s framework is not merely a holder of a certain relation to capital. They are a being whose body is worn down by labour, whose intimate relations are distorted by exhaustion and economic precarity, whose dwelling is determined by proximity to industrial production, whose material conditions are shaped by ownership structures they did not choose, and whose entire symbolic self-understanding is saturated with ideological misrepresentation of those conditions. Marx’s class cannot be understood by attending to any one mediation. All five are constitutively involved.
Marx’s class also has maximal recursivity bandwidth. The concept presupposes L2 misalignment: the worker’s felt exploitation, the suffering that is the lived content of class position. It demands an L3 process of articulation: class consciousness, the movement from felt misalignment to named recognition of one’s structural position. It creates an L4 political category: the proletariat as a subject of history capable of organised action. And it generates an L5 critique of ideological misrecognition: the claim that existing society systematically prevents workers from correctly understanding their class position, which is why the theorist’s work is necessary. Marx’s class also introduces the possibility of inhabiting a class position without knowing it, the distinction between a class “in itself” and a class “for itself.” This is a concept that spans from L2 to L5, requires self-application by the persons it classifies, and contains a built-in theory of why people might resist that self-application.
Both Ricardo and Marx used the word “class.” Neither word announces any of this. The difference between them is visible only through sustained engagement with what each concept is being asked to do. Political movements that treat workers as Ricardian classes, as structural positions requiring no self-application, no consciousness, no movement from L2 to L4, will fail for reasons they cannot diagnose from within their own framework.
“Debt” illustrates how a deliberately low-bandwidth L4 concept achieves its reliability. Debt primarily stabilises the multimaterial and multisymbolic relation between creditor and debtor. It has real downstream effects on embodiment and dwelling, but the concept itself does not attempt to stabilise these dimensions, and the decision-making apparatus built on it is calibrated to the mediational scope the concept actually claims. “Major Depressive Disorder,” by contrast, is officially presented as a low-bandwidth concept targeted at a specific symptom cluster, while being functionally asked to stabilise a person’s entire mesocosmic situation. This discrepancy between formal bandwidth and functional bandwidth is one of the primary sources of its failure, and it is entirely invisible in the concept’s name.
5. Mesocosmic Fit: The Master Criterion
Mediational bandwidth and recursivity bandwidth both raise the question of fit: does the concept’s abstraction preserve the relevant structure of the domain it governs?
Mesocosmic fit is the master criterion for evaluating actionable concepts. It asks whether the form of abstraction matches the ontology of the domain. A concept with high fit narrows a field without losing its signal. A concept with low fit either eliminates the relevant coordination or substitutes a different mediational domain for the one actually at issue.
Four things are routinely confused with mesocosmic fit.
Truth asks whether the concept identifies something real. A concept can be true and still have low fit if it is asked to stand in for the whole. “Major Depressive Disorder” may correctly identify a cluster of symptoms and yet have low fit if those symptoms are the least important part of what is happening, and if the clinical response reorganises the person’s life around the symptom cluster rather than the underlying coordination.
Utility asks whether the concept allows action. A concept can be administratively useful and still have low mesocosmic fit. Its utility derives from institutional portability, not from accuracy as an account of the domain.
Stability asks whether the concept persists institutionally. This is the most dangerous confusion. A concept can be enforced, built into infrastructure, used by millions of practitioners, and cited in thousands of studies while still having low mesocosmic fit. Enforcement produces stability. It does not produce fit.
Fit asks whether the concept tracks the lived coordination of the domain. A concept has high fit when abstraction preserves the signal. A concept can therefore be true but low-fit, useful but low-fit, or stable but low-fit, or all four at once in the best case.
6. Non-Recursive Domains and the Tuberculosis Comparator
A non-recursive domain is one in which the entities governed by a concept are indifferent to being named, classified, and treated. The pathogen does not care whether it is called “tuberculosis” or “consumption.” It does not reorganise its behaviour in response to being diagnosed. It does not develop a self-understanding shaped by the classification. The domain is non-recursive: the concept’s application does not change the domain’s own operations.
Tuberculosis is the paradigm case of a concept well-suited to a non-recursive domain. The concept has high mesocosmic fit for several reasons. First, it is anchored by a quasi-L3 entity: the bacillus is observable, isolable, and causally decisive. The L4 category “tuberculosis” is therefore almost observational in character, pointing toward something that can in principle be indicated directly. Second, its mediational bandwidth is appropriately narrow: the concept primarily stabilises the embodiment dimension, the pathological process in the lung, and the multimaterial dimension, the drug treatment. It does not attempt to stabilise being-with, dwelling, or multisymbolism as constitutive dimensions of the condition. Third, its recursivity bandwidth is minimal: the concept does not require self-application by the patient. A patient who refuses to understand themselves as “a tuberculosis patient” can still be treated effectively. The concept’s application does not depend on the patient’s self-understanding.
The result is that tuberculosis as a clinical concept achieves high institutional stability through high mesocosmic fit. The concept’s stability is not merely enforced; it is earned. The treatment works because the concept correctly identifies the causal agent and the relevant mediational domain.
This is why the tuberculosis analogy has been so consequential in the history of psychiatry. When Robert Spitzer and his colleagues developed DSM-III in 1980, they explicitly modelled the new diagnostic system on the disease concept of physical medicine (Spitzer, Endicott, and Robins 1978). The ambition was to give psychiatry the same kind of observational anchor that tuberculosis had: a concept pointing toward something real, with clear decision thresholds and reliable treatment protocols. The analogy was not merely rhetorical. It shaped the entire architecture of DSM: the symptom checklist, the duration criteria, the threshold number of symptoms required for diagnosis. All of these are structural features of a concept designed for a non-recursive domain.
7. Self-Recursive Domains and the Enlightenment Binary
A self-recursive domain is one in which the entities governed by a concept respond to being classified, but primarily through internal feedback rather than through mutual interpretation and shared symbolisation. The domain changes in response to being described, but the change is mediated by the entity’s own internal processes rather than by a shared symbolic field.
The Enlightenment binary of nature and culture is the paradigm case of a concept applied to a self-recursive domain as if it were non-recursive. The binary was designed to sort phenomena into two mutually exclusive categories: those that fall under natural law and are therefore the domain of science, and those that are products of human convention and are therefore the domain of history, politics, and culture. This sorting was designed to be exhaustive and stable: every phenomenon either belongs to nature or to culture, and the sorting does not change the phenomenon itself.
But the binary was applied to domains that are in fact self-recursive. Human beings are not indifferent to being classified as “natural” or “cultural.” The classification reorganises how they understand themselves, what kinds of explanation they accept for their behaviour, and what kinds of intervention they consider legitimate. The history of the concept of “race” illustrates this clearly. Race was introduced as a natural category, a classification of human beings by biological type on the model of species classification in natural history. The claim was that race was a non-recursive domain: the racial category applied to a person regardless of their self-understanding, just as a species classification applies to an organism regardless of its self-understanding. But race is not a non-recursive domain. The classification reorganised the self-understanding of both the classified and the classifiers, shaped the institutions through which people were governed, and generated recursive loops between classification, self-understanding, and social organisation that are still operative.
The Enlightenment binary also produced a specific form of conceptual disguise: the presentation of culturally specific classifications as natural facts. By formatting cultural constructions as natural categories, the binary made them appear non-recursive and therefore immune to the kind of mesocosmic critique that would ask: does this concept fit the domain it governs?
8. Inter-Recursive Domains and the Deepest Disguise
An inter-recursive domain is one in which multiple beings respond to each other, to shared symbolic systems, and to the classifications that name them. The domain changes not merely through internal feedback but through mutual interpretation and through the reorganisation of coordination by the concepts used to govern it.
Mental health is an inter-recursive domain. A person in distress does not merely respond to being classified; they respond to the classification in the context of a shared symbolic field that includes other people’s responses to the classification, institutional structures built around it, and the self-understanding that the classification makes available. The domain is not merely self-recursive; it is constitutively shaped by the mutual interpretation of all the parties involved.
The deepest form of conceptual disguise is the L4 concept that governs an inter-recursive domain while presenting itself as if it were governing a non-recursive one. This is the disguise that MDD performs.
MDD presents as an entity-naming concept on the tuberculosis model: a concept that identifies a bounded entity (the disorder) in a non-recursive domain (the patient’s biology). But depression is not a bounded entity in a non-recursive domain. It is a field of inter-recursive coordination involving the person’s embodiment, their relationships, their self-understanding, the symbolic systems available to them for articulating distress, the institutional responses that classification makes available, and the recursive loops between all of these.
Three consequences follow from this disguise.
First, it conceals the arbitrariness of the decision threshold. Tuberculosis has a non-arbitrary threshold: either the bacillus is present or it is not. MDD has an arbitrary threshold: five of nine symptoms for two weeks. The number five is not derived from the domain. It is a decision about where to draw a line in a continuous distribution of distress. By presenting itself as entity-naming, MDD makes this arbitrary threshold appear as if it were a natural boundary, like the presence or absence of a pathogen.
Second, it conceals the inter-recursive character of the domain. Tuberculosis operates in a non-recursive domain: the bacillus does not care whether it is classified or treated. MDD presents as the same kind of concept, implying that depression is similarly indifferent to being named and treated. But depression is constitutively inter-recursive. Patients diagnosed with MDD do not remain indifferent to that diagnosis. It enters their self-understanding, shapes how they present in subsequent encounters, colours what they expect of treatment, and alters how they interpret their own fluctuations. The diagnosis does not discover a pre-existing state; it participates in constituting one (Ecks 2026). By formatting itself as entity-naming, MDD also formats its domain as non-recursive, which it is not.
Third, it conceals the mediational bandwidth of the condition. The DSM symptom list focuses primarily on embodiment (sleep, appetite, energy, psychomotor function) and on certain aspects of multisymbolism (self-reported worthlessness, difficulty concentrating, thoughts of death). This is consistent with the entity-naming format: the tuberculosis analogy suggests that the real condition is located in a specific biological domain. But depression is distributed across all five mediations. It alters being-with: relationships become strained, dependent, or withdrawn. It alters dwelling: the same geography sustains or suffocates differently as the condition evolves. It alters multimateriality: the accumulated physical apparatus of treatment, tablets, clinic visits, insurance forms, mediates the course of the condition in ways that are constitutive, not merely instrumental. The entity-naming format makes the high-bandwidth reality of depression invisible inside a low-bandwidth conceptual container.
The result is that MDD is simultaneously an L4 formatted as entity-naming L3, a concept of an inter-recursive domain presenting as a concept of a non-recursive entity, and a high-bandwidth concept wearing low-bandwidth clothing. The subsequent history of controversy about MDD, the debates about antidepressant efficacy, about cultural transportability, about the medicalisation of ordinary sadness (Horwitz and Wakefield 2007), about the relationship between depression and social conditions, is in LVT terms a history of the consequences of this disguise being slowly and incompletely unmasked.
9. Original Misfit
Inter-recursive domains are those in which multiple beings respond to each other, to shared symbolic systems, and to the classifications that name them. The domain changes not merely through internal feedback but through mutual interpretation and through the reorganisation of coordination by the concepts used to govern it. Mental health, intimate relationships, class position, gender, and law are all inter-recursive in this sense.
Original misfit occurs when a concept never adequately fitted the domain it was designed or used to stabilise: not degradation over time but malformation at entry.
The conceptual history of depression in Japan illustrates this clearly. Kitanaka (2012) shows that prior to the intensive pharmaceutical marketing of SSRIs in Japan in the late 1990s, depression was diagnosed at considerably lower rates than in North America and Western Europe, and occupied a markedly different position in Japanese clinical culture. Suffering was (presumably) common, but the idioms through which suffering was articulated, the moral and relational frameworks within which it was embedded, and the institutional pathways available for seeking help were all organised differently from the Anglo-American framework within which MDD was developed.
When pharmaceutical companies marketing SSRIs introduced “depression” as a common and treatable condition, they were not translating a pre-existing concept. They were reorganising a mesocosm. The concept did not discover a domain of suffering that had been invisible. It helped create a new domain of articulation, institutional recognition, pharmaceutical treatment, self-understanding, and identity. MDD entered the Japanese clinical context carrying not only its cultural assumptions but its concealed structure, presenting itself as a neutral observational concept (like a diagnostic test for a pathogen) when it was in fact a decision algorithm calibrated to a specific mediational and institutional configuration.
This account goes further than Ian Hacking’s analysis of the “looping effects of human kinds” (Hacking 1995). Hacking showed that people respond to being classified: they reorganise their self-presentation in light of categories applied to them. But the concept does not enter an undifferentiated social space and produce looping effects in a vacuum. It enters a specific mediational configuration, and the character of the original misfit depends on the distance between the mediational and recursivity assumptions built into the concept and those that actually govern the domain it enters.
10. Hysteresis
Hysteresis is the failure mode where a concept once had relatively good mesocosmic fit but continues to operate after the domain has changed.
Melancholia, in its ancient and medieval form, was not primarily a disorder to be treated but a temperamental and dispositional formation: a characteristic way of being associated with heaviness, depth of thought, and creative and philosophical achievement (Radden 2000; Burton 1621/2001). It had reasonably good fit with a mesocosm in which medicine, moral philosophy, and social recognition were not yet sharply differentiated, and in which distress was embedded in relational, cosmic, and theological frameworks of meaning. As European medicine professionalised through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, melancholia persisted as a concept while its mediational field changed radically around it. By the time Freud wrote “Mourning and Melancholia” in 1917, the concept retained its name but was operating in an almost entirely different mesocosm, defined by individual psychology and the therapeutic relationship rather than by humoral constitution and cosmic temperament.
Neurasthenia illustrates the same pattern. Beard’s neurasthenia (1869) had reasonably good fit with a late nineteenth-century mesocosm in which the relationship between nervous exhaustion, social demands, and bodily depletion was widely recognised and institutionally supported. It was a high-bandwidth concept that attempted to stabilise embodiment, being-with, dwelling, and multimateriality simultaneously. As the twentieth century reorganised the institutional landscape of medicine, neurasthenia lost its institutional support in North America and Western Europe. It did not disappear because it was false. It disappeared because the institutional infrastructure that had made it actionable was dismantled. The concept survived in China, where it retained institutional support and continued to provide a framework for distress that preserved the relational and social dimensions that MDD discards (Kleinman 1988; Shorter 1992).
The history of depression is therefore a history of repeated hysteresis: concepts that once had reasonable fit with specific mesocosms continuing to operate after those mesocosms have changed, while new concepts are introduced that claim to have better fit but in fact carry their own concealed structures.
11. Cultural, Sequential, Evaluative, and Causal Misfit
Four further forms of misfit complete the typology.
Cultural misfit is the failure of a concept to travel across mesocosms without importing distorting assumptions. This is distinct from original misfit: a concept can be adequate to its home mesocosm while being inadequate to the mesocosm it enters. MDD’s entry into Japan is an example of cultural misfit as well as original misfit: the concept was not only malformed at entry but carried assumptions about the individual, the body, and the therapeutic relationship that did not fit the Japanese mesocosm.
Sequential misfit is the failure of a concept to map the correct order or dependency of processes in inter-recursive domains. In inter-recursive domains, the order of events is not the order of formation. A person’s distress may precede the diagnosis, but the diagnosis reorganises the distress retroactively, shaping how the person understands what they were experiencing before the diagnosis was made. A concept that assumes a simple temporal sequence, first the condition, then the diagnosis, then the treatment, misrepresents the recursive structure of the domain. DSM’s assumption that the disorder precedes and causes the symptoms, rather than being constituted by the diagnostic process, is a form of sequential misfit.
Evaluative misfit is the failure of a concept to use criteria that match the value structure of the domain. Institutions measure what they can stabilise rather than what the domain values. The Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression measures symptom severity on a numerical scale that enables statistical comparison and clinical trial design. But the domain it governs, the lived experience of distress and recovery, does not value numerical severity as its primary dimension. A person who scores lower on the Hamilton scale but has lost the capacity for meaningful relationships, purposeful work, and engagement with the world has not improved in the terms that matter most to the domain. Evaluative misfit is the systematic substitution of what can be measured for what is valued.
Causal misfit is the failure of a concept to assume a causal structure appropriate to the domain’s recursive ontology. The biomedical model of depression assumes a causal structure in which biological dysfunction causes psychological symptoms, which can be corrected by pharmaceutical intervention targeting the biological dysfunction. This causal model is appropriate for non-recursive domains. In inter-recursive domains, causation is constitutively bidirectional: the biological, psychological, relational, and institutional dimensions of distress mutually constitute each other, and intervention at any one level has recursive effects on all others. The biomedical model’s assumption of unidirectional causation is a form of causal misfit.
12. Institutionalisation and the Redistribution of Recursivity
When actionable L4 concepts are applied to inter-recursive domains, they do not merely describe the domain. They reorganise it. The most consequential reorganisation is what LVT calls the redistribution of recursivity.
In an inter-recursive domain before the application of an actionable concept, the recursive activity, the interpretation, the self-understanding, the negotiation of meaning, is distributed across all the parties involved. A person in distress, their family, their community, and their healers all participate in the recursive process of making sense of what is happening and what should be done. The actionable concept does not merely add a new layer to this process. It relocates the recognised site of recursive activity from the persons in the domain to the authorised professional or institutional actors who apply the concept.
Once MDD is applied, the person in distress is no longer the primary interpreter of their own condition. The diagnosis relocates interpretive authority to the clinician, the DSM, the pharmaceutical company, and the insurance system. The person’s own account of their experience becomes data to be assessed against the diagnostic criteria rather than the primary source of understanding. Their self-understanding is relevant only insofar as it confirms or disconfirms the diagnosis. This is the redistribution of recursivity: the recognised site of recursive activity moves from the person to the institution.
The redistribution of recursivity is not always harmful. In some cases, the person in distress genuinely benefits from having interpretive authority relocated to an expert who can provide effective treatment. But the redistribution is harmful when the concept has low mesocosmic fit, because the institution then enforces a framework that does not track the domain’s actual coordination. The person is required to articulate their experience in terms that do not fit it, to accept a causal model that misrepresents their situation, and to submit to treatments calibrated to a concept that does not capture what is happening. This is what LVT calls forced misarticulation: the institutional production of speech that does not match the experience it is required to express.
The Denig-Lawrie case (2021) provides the clearest clinical illustration of what it looks like to resist the redistribution of recursivity while still using actionable concepts. Denig and Lawrie describe a clinical encounter in which the clinician works at L3 as long as possible, attending to the particular texture of the patient’s distress, their specific relational situation, their embodied experience, and their own account of what is happening. The clinician applies L4 stabilisations lightly and provisionally, always keeping them answerable to new L3 detail. When the patient describes finding suicide “comforting,” the clinician does not immediately translate this into a risk assessment protocol. They stay with the L3 description, asking what it means in this person’s specific situation, before deciding whether and how to apply any L4 framework.
This practice is not captured by any existing framework. DSM does not have a positive term for “working at L3 as long as possible.” The Kleinman tradition of cultural psychiatry recognises the importance of the patient’s explanatory model but does not have a concept for the specific skill of holding L4 stabilisations lightly while remaining responsive to L3 detail. The Denig-Lawrie case is valuable precisely because it shows that this practice exists and can be described, even if the existing frameworks cannot name it.
13. A Diagnostic Protocol
The analysis of actionable concepts developed in this article can be condensed into a diagnostic protocol. For any actionable concept, the following questions should be asked.
What is its symbolic mode? Is the concept operating as mesocosmic coordination, reference to absence, or re-presentation? Is there a gap between its official mode and its operative mode?
What is its recursivity level? Is the concept functioning at L3, L4, or L5? Is it presenting its level accurately, or is it disguising an L4 decision algorithm as L3 entity-naming?
What is its mediational bandwidth? How many of the five mediations does the concept formally claim to stabilise? How many does it functionally attempt to stabilise? Is there a gap between formal and functional bandwidth?
What is its recursivity bandwidth? How many recursivity levels does the concept span or require? Does it require self-application by the persons it classifies? Does it contain a built-in theory of why people might resist that self-application?
What is the recursivity status of its domain? Is the domain non-recursive, self-recursive, or inter-recursive? Does the concept’s architecture match the domain’s ontology?
What is its mesocosmic fit? Does the concept’s abstraction preserve the relevant structure of the domain? Is its stability earned through fit or enforced through institutional power?
What forms of misfit does it exhibit? Original, hysteretic, cultural, sequential, evaluative, or causal?
What redistribution of recursivity does it produce? Who gains interpretive authority when the concept is applied? Who loses it? Is forced misarticulation being generated?
14. Conclusion
What ordinary language and institutional habit conceal is that actionable concepts carry multiple hidden properties. They vary in symbolic mode, in recursivity level, in mediational bandwidth, in recursivity bandwidth, and in the domain ontology they presuppose. They can disguise their own level, presenting as L3 entity-naming when they are in fact L4 decision algorithms. They can be high-bandwidth in practice while appearing low-bandwidth in form. And they can become institutionally stable not through mesocosmic fit but through enforcement: through the suppression of the domain’s permission to respond.
The tuberculosis/MDD comparison crystallises what is at stake. Tuberculosis is L4 as a clinical category but anchored by a quasi-L3 entity, the pathogen, which gives the diagnosis its near-observational character, its appropriate causal model, and its low functional mediational bandwidth. MDD is L4 masquerading as L3 entity-naming, governing an inter-recursive domain as if it were non-recursive, with high functional mediational bandwidth hidden inside a low-bandwidth format. The two concepts look identical in the grammar of ordinary language. They do completely different work across every dimension that matters. This is the trapdoor.
The history of depression is a history of this trapdoor repeatedly opening. Melancholia carried a rich mediational bandwidth and a self-recursive ontological assumption that, though wrong in mechanism, was at least right in kind. Neurasthenia preserved the recognition that suffering involves recursive interaction between body and social environment. MDD replaced these gradated, recursive accounts with a binary decision concept formatted as entity-naming, achieving global institutional stability at the cost of the domain’s own complexity.
The Denig-Lawrie case shows that the conceptual inadequacy of the dominant frameworks does not prevent good clinical practice. What it prevents is the teaching, naming, and defence of that practice. A clinician who works at L3 as long as possible, applying L4 stabilisations lightly and provisionally, keeping them always answerable to new L3 detail, is doing something that neither DSM nor the Kleinman tradition has a positive term for. Good practice happens despite the frameworks. The gap between what is done in the best moments of clinical work and what can be said about it is the gap that LVT’s account of actionable concepts is designed to close.
Mesocosmic humility is the orientation this requires. It does not mean refusing to use actionable concepts. It means using them with awareness of their cuts: knowing what the concept stabilises, what it compresses, what it ignores, and what it forces people to say about themselves in order to be recognised. It means asking, of every actionable concept, what level it is actually operating at, whether it is presenting that level accurately, how wide its mediational and recursivity bandwidth really is, and what kind of domain it governs. In recursive worlds, conceptual power without mesocosmic humility becomes symbolic overreach. The first task of actionable concept analysis is to make visible what ordinary language systematically hides.
Glossary
L3. Articulating concept. The level of naming and describing what is immediately available in the mesocosm: entities, states, and processes that can be indicated without further abstraction. L3 opens a field without closing it for decision.
L4. Actionable concept. The level of abstraction from many L3 particulars into a general category. Not all L4 concepts license consequential decisions; those that do are actionable in the strong sense. L4 is prone to leave immediate mesocosmic salience behind.
Symbolic mode. The operative function of a concept in a given context. Mesocosmic coordination: the symbol is embedded in an immediate, verifiable coordination (“pass me the salt”). Reference to absence: the symbol points toward something not present (the philosopher’s “cat is on the mat”). Re-presentation: the symbol stops pointing toward an absence and becomes the thing itself (the Christian Eucharist). Not marked in ordinary language.
Mediational bandwidth. The range of the five mediations (embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality, multisymbolism) that a concept attempts to stabilise. Not revealed by ordinary language. The gap between formal and functional bandwidth is a primary site of conceptual danger.
Recursivity bandwidth. The range of recursivity levels a concept spans or requires, including whether it demands self-application by the persons it classifies. Ricardo’s class has minimal recursivity bandwidth; Marx’s class has maximal recursivity bandwidth. Distinct from mediational bandwidth.
Domain recursivity status. Whether a concept’s domain is non-recursive (indifferent to being described), self-recursive (responsive through internal feedback), or inter-recursive (responsive through mutual interpretation and shared symbolisation). Not revealed by ordinary language.
Disguised-L4 concept. An L4 decision concept formatted to appear as L3 entity-naming, presenting a decision algorithm as an observational report. Major Depressive Disorder is the paradigm case.
Trapdoor of ordinary language. The systematic invisibility, in ordinary language symbolisation specifically, of the most consequential properties of concepts: their symbolic mode, recursivity level, mediational bandwidth, recursivity bandwidth, and domain recursivity status. Does not apply to mathematics, musical notation, or other constrained symbol systems.
Mesocosmic fit. The degree to which a concept tracks the lived coordination of the domain it governs. Distinguished from truth, utility, and institutional stability.
Original misfit. A concept’s failure to fit the domain it was designed or used to stabilise from the very beginning. Not degradation over time but malformation at entry.
Hysteresis. A concept’s persistence after the mesocosmic conditions that once supported it have changed.
Cultural misfit. A concept’s failure to travel across mesocosms without importing distorting assumptions. Distinct from original misfit: a concept can be adequate to its home mesocosm while being inadequate to the mesocosm it enters.
Sequential misfit. A concept’s failure to map the correct order or dependency of processes in inter-recursive domains, where the order of events is not the order of formation.
Evaluative misfit. A concept’s use of criteria that do not match the value structure of the domain. Institutions measure what they can stabilise rather than what the domain values.
Causal misfit. A concept’s assumption of a causal structure inappropriate to the domain’s recursive ontology.
Redistribution of recursivity. The structural effect of applying actionable concepts to inter-recursive domains: the recognised site of recursive activity is relocated from the persons in the domain to authorised professional or institutional actors.
Forced misarticulation. The institutional production of speech that does not match the experience it is required to express. Generated by enforcement of low-fit categories in inter-recursive domains.
Mesocosmic humility. The disciplined recognition that concepts and institutions cannot capture the whole domain they stabilise, combined with the willingness to design and use concepts accordingly.
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