The two layers below are how that thesis is built: the social layer is where reasoning already happens informally, and the reasoning layer is where its structure is captured as data — in the same place, through a single reversible action, rather than bolted on afterward as a separate annotation chore.
The two layers
The social layer (MESH) is a complete, standalone community platform: a chronological feed with eight post types (text, image, audio, gallery, article, library, thread, document), profiles with friend and follow systems, persistent rooms and lounges, spatial canvas environments, sheaf-based layered messaging with drifts, proposals and polls, a long-form article system with anchored comments and rhetoric overlays, and shared document libraries. It requires no engagement with the reasoning layer.
The reasoning layer (Isonomia) provides formal deliberation infrastructure: argumentation schemes with auto-generated critical questions, typed dialogue moves with protocol enforcement, commitment stores, evidence management with executable citations, ASPIC+ grounded-extension evaluation, Ludics game-theoretic evaluation, confidence scoring, and a cross-context transport network. It is reachable from any point in the social layer through a single, reversible upgrade action: a discussion can become a deliberation, a comment can become a claim, an annotation can become a proposition.
The spectrum: informal to formal
Every feature exists at a position on a continuous spectrum, and moving between adjacent points is a single reversible user action:
- Conversation: feed posts and comments → threaded discussion with topics → deliberation with typed moves and commitment tracking.
- Arguments: opinions in prose → claims with stated reasons → arguments instantiating recognized schemes with critical questions.
- Disagreement: replies and reactions → specific objections with grounds → formal challenges creating tracked obligations to respond.
- Evidence: links and anecdotes → cited sources with annotations → executable citations with anchor types, intent labels, and DOI resolution.
- Persistence: a feed that scrolls past → a searchable archive → a knowledge base with live deliberation blocks and stable citable references.
- Cross-context: cross-posting → shared references → transport functors with fingerprinted provenance and confidence gating.
The knowledge production pipeline
When a community’s work moves from informal to formal, the platform models the trajectory as a pipeline. Informal discussion surfaces propositions, which are workshopped into claims and structured into arguments through formal schemes. Arguments are challenged through protocol-enforced dialogue moves; the moves accrue in commitment stores, which the Ludics engine analyzes for convergence and divergence. Those determinations feed confidence scores, which gate the Plexus network as arguments transport across rooms with fingerprinted provenance. Not every community traverses the full pipeline — it exists in its entirety so the infrastructure is present when the reasoning reaches a complexity that warrants it.
The reasoning engine
The reasoning layer implements four families of formalism: structured argumentation via ASPIC+ grounded extensions and the Walton taxonomy of schemes with auto-generated critical questions; interactive proof theory via Ludics designs; typed dialogue protocols with commitment stores; and a category-theoretic evidence algebra over typed evidence arrows, with a closed-monoid confidence fold over a lawful log-odds (weight-of-evidence) semiring and culprit-set belief revision. Evidence enters through a six-stage citation resolver (arXiv, Crossref, page metadata, OpenAlex, LLM extraction, Wayback) with four-tier confidence gating. The details live in the argument graph documentation.
Living documents
Theses, briefs, and peer reviews embed claims and arguments that read live state from the graph, with inspectors, attack registers, auditable confidence cards, point-in-time snapshots, and fork/merge. A living document is not a frozen copy of the reasoning — it updates as the underlying deliberation updates.
Institutional pathways
A workflow layer carries deliberation outputs into authorized bodies through a verifiable institution registry, hash-chained pathway audit logs, versioned recommendation packets, submission channels, and facilitator cockpits with real-time equity surfaces.
The Plexus network
Plexus connects deliberation rooms as a graph-of-graphs across five typed meta-edges (shared claims, shared evidence, transported arguments, cross-references, institutional links). Room functors transport arguments while preserving inferential structure, carrying provenance with SHA-1 fingerprinted integrity, under three confidence-gating modes: logical (ASPIC+ structure), social (community assessment), and hybrid.
Principles
Isonomia is free, self-hostable, and ad-free. There is no behavioral tracking, no algorithmic ranking, and no engagement metric. Data ownership, privacy, and provenance are enforced by architecture, not by policy: the social graph is portable and exportable in open formats, and the reasoning graph is content-hashed and cryptographically auditable.