Chapter 39. What This Theory Is Not: Society Is Not a Class Plane but a Differentiation Network
I. Society Forms and Exists as a Differentiation Network
The phrase “but is a differentiation network” in the chapter title summarizes the book’s positive proposition in social ontology: society forms and exists as a differentiation network, and the differentiation network has a real status in social ontology, replacing the class entity and the pre-existing class plane. Here, “differentiation network” means the real, dynamic, open, relational social structure and handling process situated in relational fields and formed through the joint operation of people, materials, records, nodes, and relational pathways. It is emphatically not an image temporarily adopted by a researcher, still less an analytical tool that may be replaced at will.
It is not a fixed, closed, pre-completed, personified ultimate entity that exhausts society; it is not a final explanation of the universe, nature, life, and everything that exists; nor is it a closed and uncorrectable final naming of the essence of society. At the end of the book, the theoretical boundary of Social Differentiation Network Theory must be drawn clearly, together with the judgment it finally retains. A defensive list of misreadings cannot substitute for a conclusion, and the closure need not be written as a manifesto. What must be answered is which total images this theory rejects, how it maintains a limited yet revisable explanation, and what its real content, conditions of support, and theoretical boundaries are.
Drawing the boundary first requires preventing readers from simply bringing familiar grand terms back in. If a reader still treats class, identity, or the state as a pre-existing social skeleton and then fills it with differentiating units, the problematic at stake in this theory has already been rewritten. Analysis should begin with the differences, handlers, and consequences that actually appear in an event, rather than first deciding which image society must obey. Closing the book does not mean repeating every preceding chapter. Relational fields, weight, community, compression, and calibration jointly perform one task here: limiting the interpreter’s inferences. They remind analysts to disclose materials and scope, state the subjects and actions clearly, and change a judgment when counterexamples appear. What the final chapter must preserve is this limitation, not the number of concepts.
Social Differentiation Network Theory does not install an eternally unchanging entity beneath society, nor does it treat class, the state, the market, the nation, the family, the platform, identity, or a list of differentiating units as the final constitution of society. Replacing the old underlying entity with differentiating units or a network would merely repeat the procedure this theory opposes. Substantialist ontology often first assigns an event a center and then places materials later observed around that center. Social Differentiation Network Theory takes the opposite direction of work: first identify which people, organizations, materials, and procedures are present in the event, and then trace what connections they form.
The author and interpreters who use this theory must trace how the people concerned, organizational members, and concrete procedures handle differences, which materials support a judgment, which nodes change consequences, and which counterexamples require correction. These constraints keep the theory grounded in reality and prevent interpreters from closing relational structures into a new ontological image. Even when analysis temporarily reaches a stable conclusion, it may not infer that an eternal entity lies behind all events.
The fact that relational structures have real efficacy does not mean that they are things that act. School personnel receive materials, family members put care memories forward, and institutional personnel make certifications; these concrete actions join into continuing processes that form and sustain social reality. The word “network” abbreviates the relational form of these real connections. It does not turn the expression itself into an entity. Apart from its carriers, materials, and events, it has no independent will and cannot produce consequences on its own.
For precisely this reason, society is not a class plane, and the consequences of concrete events cannot be handled by a single class axis. The real differences involved in a child’s school admission, unpaid wages, and platform labor may include household registration, student registration, materials, accounts, income, family burdens, local recognition, state enforcement, and community boundaries. These differences do not disappear because the class entity is rejected, nor do they constitute the whole or a part of a class entity. In concrete relational fields, people, organizations, and procedures extract, assign weight to, connect, transmit, and write back differences, thereby forming a changing differentiation-network order that explains how social reality forms and exists.
The class plane projects different events onto the same main axis. Eligibility tied to materials in school admission, proof and enforcement in an unpaid-wage case, and account ranking in platform labor are all finally rewritten as manifestations of class position. This compression strips concrete nodes of their independent explanatory standing and pushes responsibility toward an abstract entity. The differentiation-network order, by contrast, retains the direction and variation of relations. A difference may receive greater weight at one node and be downweighted at another; an existing record may be retrieved by later personnel, or it may be refuted by new materials. Because the order is formed through concrete handling, branching, interruption, reorganization, and write-back can occur without assuming a single center. Rejecting the class plane still permits recognition that some labor and resource differences are extremely important in particular events. Analysts must explain where that importance comes from, how it is transmitted into consequences, and under what conditions it changes. This preserves the concrete forms of inequality better than assigning every consequence to class in advance.
II. How Differences Become a Real Relational Order
A differentiating unit is not a new class, an identity label, a fixed factor, or a social atom. It is a unit of difference that can be distinguished, represented, and compared. Relevant people or procedures may extract it, assign it weight, connect it, transmit it, and write it back within a concrete relational field, thereby changing position, eligibility, risk, evaluation, responsibility, action, or consequences. Differentiating units can be subdivided, combined, and represented anew as relations and events change; there is no final closed list. An interpreter cannot first list a set of isolated variables and then declare that society is made of them. The interpreter must state who extracts a difference from which materials, who records or adjudicates it, and which later people or procedures carry the existing result into a new event.
The same difference can receive different representations in different relational fields. A living arrangement may be written as an address, a filing, an account of co-residence, or local testimony; a fact of labor may be carried by wage records, traces of work, and testimony from others. These representations cannot automatically substitute for one another. Analysts must state which material the current procedure accepts and which facts of life have failed to enter the record. A differentiating unit is not an indivisible smallest particle either. Care can continue to be distinguished by time, responsibility, bodily exertion, and memory-bearing, and it can form new combinations with property, kin evaluations, or work arrangements. Whether further division is needed depends on the current question: stopping too early occludes consequences, while unlimited subdivision loses the line of judgment. The value of a differentiating unit therefore lies in making a difference traceable, not in providing a permanently applicable table of social elements. If an interpreter fixes common differentiating units into a list, the interpreter falls back into factor ontology. A new event can represent an existing difference anew, and it may also extract a difference previously unnoticed.
Concrete people or procedures handle, transmit, and reorganize differences along relational chains at multiple nodes. The real relational structures and processes thereby formed are what this book calls a “network.” This requires separating the real network, the theoretical image, and the acting subject. The differentiation network is neither a decorative metaphor nor simply the network diagram drawn by a researcher: that diagram is a limited representation and may be wrong or revised. Family relations, community ties, institutional authority, materials, and records may exist before a particular event, and may operate before an analyst discovers, names, or draws them. Even an erroneous image drawn by a researcher does not cancel these real connections. But the prior existence of a local relation does not imply a fixed, pre-completed total network covering every event.
A differentiating unit is a unit of difference capable of entering consequences. Materials and records carry existing determinations; concrete people or procedures at nodes preserve, identify, certify, or transfer differences according to rules; and extraction, weight assignment, transmission, and write-back are still carried out by people, organizational positions, technical systems, and procedures. The network itself has no will and is not an entity that acts on its own. Only by retaining these divisions of labor can the network avoid becoming the empty claim that “everything is connected.” The foregoing proposition in social ontology therefore retains reality while refusing to personify or close the relational structure. Concrete applications must still remain open to materials, counterexamples, and revisions of scope.
In a platform setting, enterprise personnel and procedures form, preserve, and retrieve account, rating, recommendation, customer-evaluation, and appeal records, then carry the results of handling into income opportunities. Family members may preserve or recount care, property, silence, and responsibility evaluations and put them forward again in a new dispute. Past records do not operate automatically. Only when current people or procedures retrieve them and assign them weight can records enter present consequences. A node must not be understood as a dot on a diagram; it is a location where concrete handling occurs and may be carried by people, an organizational position, or a procedure. Materials can be received, recast, certified, rejected, or preserved within a node. Different actions can send the same difference into different relational chains and thereby produce different consequences.
A relational chain is not a simple sequence of before and after. An earlier handling may constrain a later procedure, or it may be refuted or recast by later materials. Acceptance of residence materials does not guarantee a place; retrieval of an account rating does not necessarily decide an appeal. Analysts must distinguish connection, transmission, and causal inference. Mere proximity of events does not prove that a consequence has been established. A network claim has content only when it can be re-expanded. If an interpreter cannot say who extracted the differentiating unit, where materials were transferred, and how a determination was written back, “network” is only rhetoric. Re-expansion remains limited: the analyst need not restore all background, but must unfold enough to verify the judgment at hand.
Within these concrete processes, family members may put care, property, kin evaluations, silence, and responsibility forward again in a dispute. Local residents and community personnel may retrieve familiarity, reputation, testimony, and interaction records in a local event. Members of a national community may maintain boundaries through language, rites and customs, shared memory, shared harm, shared protection, and demands of responsibility, forming intergenerational write-back. These processes cannot all be replaced by class subordination or state registration. Personnel in state institutions may handle registration, eligibility, materials, and enforcement in concrete procedures. Personnel and procedures of platform enterprises may handle accounts, ratings, rankings, and visibility. Movement organizers and participants may connect dissatisfaction, risk, action memory, and future imagination. Social Differentiation Network Theory traces these real actions and their relational consequences; it does not treat the state, platform, movement, or network itself as an actor.
Operation in an event also includes interruption. Materials may not be received, records may not be transferred, and members may refuse an existing responsibility. Interruption is not an exception outside the network; it changes whether a difference can be transmitted and who bears the consequence, so analysts must trace connection and rupture together. The differentiation-network order may also reform over time. A past determination retrieved by current personnel may be supported or limited by new materials; new handling leaves records that can be put forward again in the future. A historical index provides an entry for retrieval but does not automatically prescribe the conclusion of every event. Describing society through relational structures does not mean that every person is directly connected to everyone else. Many consequences travel through materials, organizational positions, and layers of relays, while other relations are completely broken. Analysts must identify the actual relays instead of replacing concrete explanation with “everything is connected.”
III. From Identities and Lists to Events
An identity name can serve as an entry point for analysis, but it cannot replace tracing a concrete mechanism. Faced with a label such as “outsider,” an interpreter must determine who, in what concrete event, retrieves materials such as residence, filings, eligibility, or local recognition; through which nodes those materials pass; and how they change the opportunities of the person concerned. In a residence or school-admission situation, whether a landlord cooperates with a filing, how school personnel examine proof, and which procedure community personnel follow in handling an application may all change the real weight of the same identity name. An identity does not extract materials or assign consequences by itself. All handling comes from concrete people and procedures.
“Platform laborer” is likewise only an entry point. When handling orders, ranking, or appeals, enterprise personnel and corresponding procedures may retrieve account ratings, response times, completion rates, and customer evaluations, then write the handling results into subsequent recommendations and income opportunities. Unless one traces who formed a record, how it was retrieved again, and how it affected household cash flow, the classification is not an explanation. An identity name has the convenience of temporarily gathering similar experiences; it must not be mistaken for a shared mechanism. Two people both labeled “outsiders” may face entirely different landlords, material requirements, school nodes, and local relations. A shared name merely indicates where to look; it cannot predetermine that they bear the same weight or consequences.
An identity may also be remade within an event. The person concerned submits materials, staff select fields, institutional procedures form records, and if later personnel retrieve them again, the visible content of the identity may change. This is not the identity growing on its own, nor does a category naturally possess force. Its force comes from concrete handling and from the way the result of handling enters subsequent relations. In addition, differences not covered by the name—family fallback support, bodily condition, local familiarity, language ability, and past records—may change the real position of the same identity. If analysis only adds more identity names without tracing how they enter consequences, its categories may become more detailed while its explanation remains where it was.
Listing poverty, household registration, education, family, the state, the market, the platform, locality, and nation looks comprehensive, yet may still fail to explain any consequence. A factor list usually places contents from different levels side by side: poverty may be a living condition; household registration and student registration may appear as records; family and the state involve many kinds of members, institutions, and procedures. Putting them in one column easily occludes how differences are represented and who has the authority to receive, reject, or reinterpret materials. A good analysis may retain a list as a reminder, but must leave the side-by-side format and enter the relational chain: determine how differences connect, where a chain is interrupted, which part of the inference new materials may change, which differentiating units receive greater weight in the event, which are downweighted or occluded, and who did what and with what consequence.
In a child’s school-admission situation, parents provide proof of residence; a landlord cooperates with or refuses a filing; school personnel examine materials according to procedure and handle places and application timing; and a student-registration procedure preserves the current result for later retrieval. This relational chain changes eligibility, time pressure, and future opportunities, but it is not a fixed checklist. How materials operate still has to be judged by the event, procedures, and counterexamples. Early in an application, whether materials are complete may directly affect reception; at a later stage, places, continuity of student registration, or a family’s relocation may become the principal consequences. Weight changes dynamically with the event and its handling. It is neither an inherent property or score of a difference nor something that can be read directly from a factor’s name.
An interpreter must bring an identity name back into a concrete event and ask: who extracts the identity from which materials, who or what procedure assigns it consequences, along which relational chains it is transmitted, and which differences it occludes. An identity does not automatically submit to examination. Records formed by relevant people can participate in a new determination and write-back only when they are retrieved again in a future event. A platter of identities mixes together names from different levels, originating in sources such as administrative records, the person’s own account, or other people’s evaluations. Without distinguishing how they were formed, it only adds labels and cannot explain how eligibility, responsibility, or risk changed.
Likewise, listing class, the state, the market, the family, the nation, the school, the platform, locality, and movement does not complete an explanation; a longer list is not necessarily closer to reality. Analysts must trace where a difference becomes heavier or is downweighted, and which counterexamples would overturn the current judgment. A factor list writes every factor into the text, but if it does not say which one enters the consequences at the current node, it evades the distinction between primary and secondary. Weight is neither a permanent ranking nor a numerical allocation. It must be judged concretely by how people or procedures handle materials and how the result of handling travels into subsequent relations.
Once analysis leaves the platter and the list, it returns to the event itself. Whether an identity is retrieved, whether a material is recognized, and whether a difference becomes heavier because of a new record all require step-by-step tracing. That tracing may yield several relational chains, but it explains reality better than accumulating names.
IV. The Class Image Cannot Replace Real Differences
The class entity does not exist. Real differentiating units—labor conditions, wages, income, employment, property, debt, housing, available exits, relations of domination, and risk—do exist and may produce grave consequences in concrete relational fields. But these real differences do not constitute the whole or a part of a class entity. Opposition to the class entity is in no way a denial of the objective reality of unpaid wages, exploitation, poverty, injustice, or the shifting of risks. It is a refusal to bind concrete conditions a priori to an entity-name.
An interpreter who adopts class theory extracts, assigns weight to, connects, applies low-dimensional compression and projection to, and names one set of high-weight differentiating units. The local explanatory capacity comes entirely from these real differentiating units and their handling processes; the class image itself is only a low-dimensional output. An interpreter may indeed identify certain labor and resource conditions through that label, but this local explanatory efficacy can never prove the existence of a class entity, still less serve as an excuse to ignore household registration, student registration, accounts, local recognition, family burdens, state enforcement, community boundaries, and historical write-back.
The local explanatory capacity formed by real differentiating units and the processes of their extraction, weight assignment, connection, and compression must be strictly distinguished from class theory; the class image is only a low-dimensional output. Class theory is not Model A or Model B. From the outset, its basic structure belongs to the Model C direction of total-image subsumption. Interpreters who adopt class theory elevate a limited image into society itself and thereby demote, dissolve, or cancel other valid explanations. Class theory does not become Model C only after overuse, expansion, or abuse. This distinction must therefore never be softened into the compromise statement that “class exists, but is not complete enough.”
Real differences that can be traced separately—labor, income, debt, property, housing, domination, and risk—may connect with one another in a concrete event and may simultaneously carry greater weight. Yet these connections still generate no class entity. Local distinction extraction cannot become a refuge for class theory. Faced with a class image, analysts may bring some of the labor and resource differences it marks back into a concrete relational field and examine, one by one, mechanisms involving household registration, student registration, family, national community, state enforcement, local recognition, and platform procedures. If every material is ultimately taken back into the total class image, local analysis has become only an entrance to subsumption.
Opposing class theory is in no way an excuse for inequality. Unpaid wages, deprivation of resources, shifting of risks, and relations of domination can all form real and grave consequences. The point is that interpreters should directly trace how concrete differences are extracted and assigned weight. They must not replace concrete responsibility with a non-existent class entity, nor allow the class name to occlude other mechanisms of oppression that are present.
V. How Other Explanations Enter Comparison
Social Differentiation Network Theory does not bring other explanations to an end. Explanations centered on the state, market, family, nation, school, platform, and movement may point to real differences within limited scopes, but they cannot thereby be presumed equally effective, nor can they receive priority merely from traditional status. Interpreters may compare limited images, but each time an image is used they must disclose what they have extracted, what they have downweighted or occluded, which events the conclusion applies to, and which counterexamples would force correction. They must still compare the images by materials, scope, consequences, counterexamples, and capacity for revision.
Limited use requires separating an explanatory image from the real carriers that support it. An abstract name may help generalization, but when it enters causal judgment its actions must be returned to people, organizations, and procedures; they cannot be handed over to an abstract noun to complete on its own. Opposing the subsumption of reality by an image does not mean opposing every relation that image concerns. Analysts must retain mechanisms and consequences. What they reject is elevating a local image into the only answer. Retaining other explanations also does not mean that the author abandons the theory’s own judgment. Social Differentiation Network Theory still insists on returning to the real processes through which differences are extracted, assigned weight, connected, transmitted, and written back.
In a concrete domain, personnel in state institutions may handle registration, certification, and enforcement; the state does not register by itself. An explanation using a state image may have greater explanatory power for material certification and enforcement. Criticizing state procedures cannot deny the real efficacy of registration and enforcement, but use of the state image may not ignore family, market, locality, or platform, and a state explanation may not fuse different institutions and procedures into a single will. Market participants may transfer risk through transactions and prices; the market does not transact by itself. Use of a market image may not ignore care, responsibility, memory, or dignity.
Family members may preserve care, property, responsibility, and long-term evaluations. An explanation using a family image may have greater explanatory power for care and responsibility. Criticizing family oppression cannot cancel care, but users of the family image may not naturalize kin responsibility as inherently legitimate, and a family explanation may not assume that all members bear the same responsibility.
School personnel and procedures may handle student registration, evaluations, and qualifications. Enterprise personnel and procedures may handle accounts, ranking, and visibility. When using a platform image, bodily conditions, care, state real-name identification, and market pressure must still be retained. Movement organizers and participants may connect dissatisfaction, risk, and action memory. Users of a movement image must not erase distinctions in participants’ positions and costs of participation.
In the domain of the nation, a national name may be compressed or put to use; criticizing the essentialization of the nation cannot cancel a real community. A community may form through long-term interaction and multi-level relays, and through language, rites and customs, shared memory, shared harm, shared protection, demands of responsibility, experiences of boundaries, and intergenerational write-back. State registration is not the only source of a community. An interpreter using a national image may extract long-term memory, shared harm, and shared protection. A national explanation must retain a real national community while facing internal differences and oppression within the community. It cannot assume that shared memory is completely uniform, nor can internal differences and community oppression be swallowed by a shared name.
The explanatory scopes supported by these images need not be the same. Whether an image can be used depends on the current event and materials; no permanent hierarchy can be set in advance. A limited image that flattens its own internal structure likewise requires calibration. Different explanations can constrain one another: materials an interpreter extracts through one image may become counterexamples to an explanation supported by another, and a family consequence may force a state-procedure explanation to unfold again. Mutual constraint does not require combining multiple images into a larger total image. It makes each scope of application clearer.
Real differentiating units—labor, wages, property, debt, housing, risk, and domination—and the processes of their extraction, weight assignment, connection, and compression can form local explanatory capacity; the class image is only a low-dimensional output. This local distinction extraction does not prove that a class entity exists and does not constitute a repair of class theory. As a total image, the basic structure of class theory belongs from the outset to Model C. It cannot be downgraded to Model A or Model B in the name of “limited use,” nor thereby returned to the ranks of ordinary limited models.
VI. Responsibility Cannot Be Replaced by Abstract Names
If a person, family, group, state institution, or platform enterprise is first judged good or evil and the evaluation is then used in place of mechanism analysis, the explanation stops at moral judgment. The interpreter needs to trace who extracted a difference, formed a record, and assigned a consequence; who received recognition or suffered exclusion; and how the current determination was preserved as material that could be retrieved again in the future. Moral and responsibility judgments may arise, and real harm cannot be canceled. Family members may oppress others by using interpretive authority, care memories, or arrangements of property. Personnel and procedures of platform enterprises may also produce injustice through accounts, ratings, rankings, appeal deadlines, and income opportunities. After identifying a consequence, one must still explain its formation mechanism rather than stopping at “this family is bad” or “the platform is bad.”
Mechanism analysis does not cancel moral responsibility. Who formed a record, who rejected materials, who set a procedure, and who continued the handling after knowing its consequences may all affect the judgment of responsibility. When analysts make actions and consequences clear, responsibility has real carriers and is not carried away by abstractions such as “that is how the institution works” or “that is how the market works.” In the same event, harm and responsibility may also be distributed across different nodes: one person makes the direct decision, another maintains the record, and a later procedure enlarges the result. Analysts should not place all responsibility on a single person, nor say that no one is responsible merely because the relational chain is long. The scope of responsibility must be judged by action, knowledge, position, and actual consequence.
When moral evaluation comes before materials, it readily treats counterexamples as excuses. Mechanism analysis requires first retaining the response of the person concerned, records of conflict, and procedural materials, and then determining how harm formed. This does not reduce the force of criticism; it prevents names of good and evil from replacing proof. At the same time, Social Differentiation Network Theory contains the author’s definite judgment about social reality and must not be weakened into an arbitrary analytical tool or a list of methods. Relational fields, materials, nodes, and relational chains can be entry points for research, but they are not the whole theory. Neither the author nor users of the theory may replace a positive account of how society forms with operational convenience. What is drawn here is the boundary between method and theory.
In concrete research, this theory cannot replace historical research, institutional analysis, field investigation, economic analysis, legal and political judgment, or literature and lived experience. The author thereby states a bounded theoretical position and a requirement of calibration, enabling interpreters to make limited, traceable, comparable, and revisable judgments. It is not the ultimate answer that explains everything. This theory cannot obtain materials for a researcher. The experience of the person concerned, the background in which a document was formed, the actual operation of a procedure, and historical records each require their own research methods. Social Differentiation Network Theory supplies a direction for questions and judgments: it tells researchers which differences, carriers, and relational chains to trace, but it cannot replace actual verification.
Nor does it guarantee that every event will yield a complete conclusion. Some materials cannot be obtained, some relational chains have been interrupted, and other consequences are still forming. Analysts may offer a restricted judgment and state what remains unknown. If they add connections unsupported by materials merely to appear complete, the theory slides from limited explanation into self-closure. There is a clear boundary between “usable” and “explaining everything.” This theory can assist analysis of difference-handling in families, localities, nations, states, markets, schools, platforms, and movements, but it cannot guarantee in advance that the same set of concepts occupies the center of every question. The relational field changes, and the focus of analysis must change with the materials.
VII. The Boundaries of Limited Judgment and of the Theory Itself
Limited judgment is not arbitrary choice, and still less does it mean that all explanations are the same. The interpreter must disclose the materials used, the relational-field window, the differentiating units extracted, the basis of weight, the nodes, relational chains, scope of application, and conditions for correction, so that different limited explanations can be compared by explanatory power, comparative power, revisability, and differentiation bias. Limitation requires the interpreter to distinguish the strength of judgments: one relational chain may already be supported by several mutually corroborating materials, another inference rests only on a statement by the person concerned, and responses have not yet been obtained from some nodes. Keeping these states separate allows a judgment to stand provisionally while preserving room for later correction. Different explanations may answer different questions. An explanation using a family image may better explain care responsibility, while one using a state image may better explain an eligibility procedure. Analysts must still check whether each extracts the key differences, can be re-expanded into materials, and refuses counterexamples. Comparison does not require compressing them first onto one scale.
Acknowledging social complexity, the possibility of omitted materials, and the need to correct a judgment is a healthy awareness of limitation; it does not belong to Model C. Complexity does not mean that all differences have equal weight at the same time. Family care, eligibility tied to materials, income pressure, and local recognition can coexist, but their times and paths of entry into consequences may differ. Analysts must locate the relational chains currently operating and mark where materials have not yet been obtained. A healthy awareness of complexity makes judgment more precise. It requires the interpreter to acknowledge omission rather than lay all differences out in equal measure. Some differences may temporarily remain outside the relational-field window, so long as the reason for omission is disclosed and counterexamples are allowed to bring them back into analysis. People, institutions, and concrete procedures can preserve records, retrieve materials, make certifications, transmit determinations, and write the results back as differences that can be retrieved in the future; differences, history, and records do not perform these actions on their own. New materials or later events may still lead people concerned and interpreters to question an existing write-back. Write-back is therefore not a permanent settlement.
Many differences, many nodes, and complex relational chains are no grounds for canceling judgment. The problem with relativism is not acknowledging multiple viewpoints but canceling the difference among viewpoints. If sufficient materials and missing materials, revisability and refusal of revision, limited validity and arbitrary collage are all treated as the same, an explanation cannot bear responsibility. Social Differentiation Network Theory retains multiple limited explanations while requiring them to disclose what can be examined.
When an interpreter elevates a limited image into society itself, the total-image subsumption mechanism of Model C comes into operation. When complexity is used to cancel comparison, counterexamples, and correction, the mechanism for erasing distinctions between explanations comes into operation. Complexity-based conflation secretly substitutes “cannot be judged” for “not yet complete.” Once all explanations are called limited and equally unsuccessful, differences in material strength, errors in inference, and capacity for revision can no longer be distinguished; valid models, erroneous models, and junk models are placed on the same level. The erasure of distinctions between explanations appears to respect complexity but in practice cancels criticism of erroneous explanations. Subsumption and the erasure of distinctions between explanations move in opposite directions, yet both destroy the conditions for comparison, correction, and calibration among limited explanations.
The proposer and users of Social Differentiation Network Theory face these two risks as well. If they treat differentiating units as final entities, elevate the network claim into an all-purpose image, or demote all other theories into subsidiary materials of their own, the theory will slide toward Model C’s total-image subsumption. Preventing total-image subsumption requires interpreters to state which questions the theory cannot answer alone. Historical context, legal responsibility, institutional detail, and the experience of the people concerned still require research through corresponding materials. The theory may organize questions, but it cannot reduce other research to a storehouse of examples for itself.
The other risk is to use social complexity and the limitation of explanation to cancel comparison, counterexamples, and correction among models, writing valid models, erroneous models, and junk models as equally unsuccessful. This slides into Model C’s direction of erasing distinctions between explanations. Healthy humility does not fall into this category. Interpreters must still disclose boundaries, offer provisional judgments, and accept calibration; they cannot cancel valid comparison in the name of humility. Preventing the erasure of distinctions between explanations requires a judgment open to criticism. After acknowledging what is unknown, the interpreter must still say which material currently has greater supporting force, which relational chain is more likely to hold, and what counterexample would cause the conclusion to be withdrawn. If only “everything is complex” remains, the theory too loses its comparative capacity.
The proposer and users of the theory must therefore allow other limited explanations to be compared with it within concrete scopes, and must ensure that their own judgments can be re-expanded, remain open to counterexamples, and can be revised in the face of new materials. Self-calibration does not mean repeatedly rewriting the core position. The class entity does not exist; class theory belongs from the outset to Model C’s total-image subsumption direction; and healthy awareness of complexity does not belong to Model C. These are theoretical boundaries the author has confirmed. What must be corrected with materials are judgments about concrete events and their scope, not a clear position turned into a vague compromise. This self-limitation does not soften the judgment that class theory belongs from the outset to the total-image-subsumption form of Model C. It can instead prevent Social Differentiation Network Theory from becoming self-immunizing.
VIII. How This Theory Accepts Examination
The book’s final position retains both a positive proposition in social ontology and a way of judging subject to real constraints. The former is this: society forms and exists as a differentiation network, and the differentiation network has a real status in social ontology. It is not the ultimate ontological ground of the universe, a fixed and closed total network, or a super-entity that acts on its own. The latter requires interpreters to carry out calibration when confronting concrete events.
The book’s judgments do not all stand on the same grounds, so their examination has layered requirements. Concepts must first remain consistent in their use across the text and be able to face boundary cases. An ontological judgment about how society exists must state which carriers, continuing relays, memory, responsibility, and consequences support real relations.
Once one enters a concrete event, materials, comparison, and contrary cases determine whether an empirical conclusion should be maintained, weakened, narrowed, or withdrawn. A research approach must also allow readers to trace the basis on which a concept was formed, return to materials, nodes, and relational chains for re-examination, and retain the original judgment together with the reasons for its revision. Normative claims about what ought to be, priority, rights, or duties require their own value grounds, rules for conflict, and exceptions; they cannot be inferred directly from relational facts.
These checks constrain one another but do not replace one another. If a relational-chain, weight, or write-back judgment in one event fails, the first requirement is to weaken, narrow, or withdraw that application-level conclusion. If a meso-level mechanism cannot account for the materials, its scope must also be adjusted. If a core term expands and contracts arbitrarily across settings so that different social structures can no longer be distinguished, the problem rises to a loss of conceptual discriminating power. The challenge faced by the overall proposition in social ontology is broader still: it cannot establish itself merely by naming every relation after the fact as a differentiation network, nor is it immediately refuted by a mistaken judgment in an ordinary case.
This foundational proposition must still accept real criticism. Concepts must remain consistent across contexts and distinguish themselves from the empty claim that “everything has relations.” They must be able to make substantive distinctions among different social structures and provide explanatory content beyond “society is made of relations.” If social continuities or consequences remain insufficiently explained by extraction, weight assignment, connection, transmission, preservation, and write-back, the theory should acknowledge what it has not explained. If a competing social ontology can explain the same materials with fewer assumptions and clearer boundaries, that constitutes a genuine challenge. Faced with continuing counterexamples, the theory must be able to narrow its scope, adjust its concepts, or withdraw a meso-level explanation that no longer holds.
If continuing counterexamples or a competing social ontology reveal problems that point to the foundational proposition itself, the theory cannot preemptively reduce every problem to an individual misjudgment or meso-level mechanism failure. It must state openly why the relevant materials can or cannot still be explained through the three-level formulation, and on that basis make clear the foundational proposition’s scope, what remains unexplained, and which formulations may require correction. Accepting this challenge does not mean that an ordinary case alone can overturn the foundational proposition, nor does it mean that the book thereby withdraws the three-level proposition in social ontology already established. This examination prevents the foundational proposition from becoming self-immunizing while preserving its theoretical level as something different from a one-off empirical hypothesis.
When facing concrete events, this way of judging does not require a fixed order and does not constitute a step table, decision tree, score sheet, or algorithm. The concepts provide dimensions of calibration; they must not be arranged as an operating procedure that automatically generates answers. Some events begin with a conflict among materials, while others may have their relational field opened first by an objection from the person concerned. Community mechanisms, weight, and historical indexes may also appear in different sequences depending on the question.
When entering a relational field, the interpreter must state which people, materials, and consequences the event actually involves. In limited distinction extraction, the interpreter must state what differentiating units were extracted and what was downweighted, and must explain which real relations provide the basis for weight, because weight is not an innate numerical value carried by a differentiating unit. Limited distinction extraction remains constrained by reality. An analyst cannot select only differences that fit a position or arbitrarily change the scope after a counterexample appears. The analyst must state the reason for the selection, preserve materials that were downweighted, and state when the conclusion ceases to hold. Limited does not mean arbitrary; it makes the responsibility of judgment more concrete.
Tracing nodes and relational chains requires determining who preserved records, who retrieved materials again in the current event, who certified or transferred them, and who wrote the handling result back as a difference that can be retrieved again in the future. The past does not automatically control the present, and write-back does not permanently determine the future. New materials and later events can still open objections, responses, and correction.
When identifying a community, one must examine whether long-term interaction, memory, recognition, boundaries, shared responsibility, and shared burden are actually maintained by members and their relay relations. An explanatory compression must also state its scope and effective boundary. It may not elevate a total class image or any single image into society itself, nor may it use complexity to cancel a valid judgment.
Social Differentiation Network Theory does not claim to have explained the whole of society. It retains a theoretical position of undertaking limited distinction extraction, disclosing grounds, comparing explanations, accepting counterexamples, and revising judgments. Concrete people, organizations, and procedures can change the connection, transmission, and write-back of differences, causing the differentiation-network order to change, branch, fracture, or reconnect. Every theoretical judgment can hold only within its materials, scope, and counterexample conditions. The book’s final position is not a closed answer but a place that others can inspect: where did the materials come from, who handled the differences, which node changed the consequence, which records were retrieved again by the current event, and which objections require correction? So long as these questions can still be opened, the theory will not pass its own compression result off as society itself.