Canon¶
Twelve canonical Split-Domain Cognition documents, each with a public preface, available for download and citation. The web canon is the source of record; these PDFs mirror it for offline reading, archival use, and circulation among readers who prefer a fixed document over a live page. Two of the variants (Valuation of talent and Cognitive architecture) were admitted after the first PDF run; their PDFs are pending the next typesetting pass — until then, the canonical reading for those two is the web page.
If a PDF and the website disagree, follow the website.
The principle and its frame¶
Split-Domain Cognition — the long-form articulation. Begins from the empirical observation that two unlike kinds of thinking are reliably collapsed into a single act, and works the observation out at the length the material requires. PDF, ~370 KB.
A Principle, Not a Pattern — the published position essay. Distinguishes the principle from its first vivid implementation (a three-stage AI pipeline) and explains why SDC has scope beyond AI tooling. Web rendering at /principle/. PDF, ~300 KB.
Process — the operational methodology. The sequence of moves by which the principle gets applied to a new domain. Medium-agnostic. PDF, ~440 KB.
Derivation Protocol v1.0 — the canonical frame for authoring a domain-specific variant. Read before drafting. The version against which a variant is admitted is recorded in that variant's review. PDF, ~370 KB.
The Split Ratio — a canonical lexical document fixing a term and the practice it names. The degree to which a single artefact maintains the split-domain discipline, self-rated on a scale of ten. Web rendering at /split-ratio/. PDF.
The eight canonical variants¶
Each variant is a domain-specific interpretation of the principle. The six below were authored together as the founding canon; two further variants (Valuation of talent and Cognitive architecture) have since been admitted. New variants follow the same protocol.
Animal Rights and Veganism — the welfare-rights collapse. Form of follow: alignment. PDF, ~390 KB.
Curation — the wall text, the catalogue essay, the exhibition design. The three-layer separation applied to the curatorial sentence. PDF, ~470 KB.
Data Work in India — the seventy-thousand-strong Indian data-annotation industry, the embodied-data-capture frontier, and the visibility commitment between a labour market and a model market. PDF, ~270 KB.
Psychiatric Diagnosis and the DSM — the collapse of observation, criterion-matching, and institutional verdict into a single utterance the diagnosed person cannot audit. PDF, ~360 KB.
Urban Planning and EIA — the Environmental Impact Assessment as approval-carrying artefact. Sabarmati, Statue of Unity, GIFT City, coastal Mumbai and Goa. PDF, ~330 KB.
User Research in Design — the bundling of observation, inference, and recommendation into a single research deliverable, across product, service, communication, architectural, and interaction design. PDF, ~330 KB.
Valuation of Talent — the training institution that borrows its trainees' market valuation as the verdict on its own work. Incubators, conservatories, sports academies, design schools, MBA and MFA programmes. Web page; PDF pending.
Cognitive Architecture — the practitioner-cognition reading. The perceptual capacity to distinguish linguistic form from judgement-shape inside one's own thinking, as the cognitive precondition for the architectural move in any external medium. Web page; PDF pending.
On citing¶
Each PDF carries a Preface block stating its version and its canonical web URL. Cite either the PDF (with version) or the corresponding web page; both are stable. The Governance page describes the one-person canon and how variants are admitted.