What We Don’t Claim: A Vocabulary Sovereignty Case Study

Systems Economics Lexicon · Beyond the Theory

Most vocabulary pages on this site exist to establish a claim. This one exists to rule several out — on purpose, not as an afterthought. A first-creator claim is only as credible as the discipline behind it, and that discipline means showing the terms that don’t survive scrutiny as plainly as the ones that do.

Terms removed after closer research

An earlier pass through this material put Functional Coordinates at the center of the whole system. That turned out to be the wrong call, and the reason is instructive. Four related terms in that same family were already occupied by other fields entirely. Functional Location is a standard SAP master-data object, deployed at hundreds of thousands of companies — practitioners even have a common shorthand for it, “FLOC.” Functional Coordinate System is established terminology in orthopaedics and biomechanics, sitting alongside the anatomical and ISB systems, and it predates this work by a wide margin. Functional Space is foundational mathematics — “function space” is a basic concept, not something any one framework can claim. The pattern across all three: Functional + [noun] inherits whatever the noun already means to whoever got there first, and “functional” itself doesn’t add enough rarity to overcome that.

Two more terms fail for reasons specific to their own fields. Subsumption already means something precise in economics — Marx’s formal and real subsumption describe capital taking over pre-existing labor processes, which is close enough to some of this material’s own ideas that using the word without crediting that lineage would be a real gap, not just an omission. Bottom-up classification is FactSet RBICS’s own description of its own method — a direct competitor’s language, not available vocabulary.

Book titles that can’t double as term claims

Virtual Economics is safe as the title of Rory Riggs’s forthcoming book, but not declarable as a term in its own right — there’s an existing peer-reviewed economics journal with that name, and “virtual economy” already has an established, different meaning (in-game economies). Systems Economics has a similar problem in miniature: there’s no single named field going by exactly that label, but Economic Systems is a live Elsevier journal — the word order flipped — in the same discipline, and “systems [discipline]” is already a productive naming pattern with plenty of existing occupants. Both stay in use as titles and descriptors. Neither gets declared as an owned term.

Field standard vocabulary — used, not owned

A longer list of terms appears throughout this material without any claim attached, because none is available to anyone: Spaceship Earth (Boulding 1965–66, Ward 1966, Fuller 1969 — not, contrary to a common assumption, the 1879 Henry George text, which doesn’t actually contain the phrase), General Systems Theory, Living Systems, Semantic Web, Ontology, Knowledge Graph, Digital Twin, and the full roster of established economic classification standards — NAICS, SIC, ISIC, NACE, GICS, ICB, TRBC, RBICS, and the rest, along with every sector and industry name any of them define. These are the shared vocabulary of the fields this work draws on, used the way any writer uses established terms — not claimed as first-creator vocabulary, because they were never available to be claimed in the first place.

Why show this at all

None of this weakens the terms that do clear review — Locus Model, Enterprise Barcode, Terminality, and the rest across this site. If anything, it strengthens them: a practice willing to publicly retract its own earlier claim on Functional Coordinates, once the prior art turned up, is a practice whose surviving claims have actually been checked rather than asserted. Showing the discards is what makes the keepers credible.

Part of Beyond the Theory, course 7 of 7 — the final course in the Locus Theory series. For the full term-by-term specification, see the Lexicon.