Updated 2026-07-18 eve WEDT · · 9 council voices + Designeee synthesis, on your "I'd like all of this to be coherence checked"
Suffix taxonomy = LENS, locked in canon. Your words: "A tendency not a rule. You're right, physics breaks the rule. Good… Physics is a tree level, agree." Etiology noted with interest. Education flow: "A dependency map does it" — adults first; a child-first version plus an explain-like-I'm-five version at the child scale come later (captured to the Sciencee lane). Nothing on this page waits on you anymore.
Sorry about the taps that wouldn't tap — they were say-this-word chips, not buttons. Fixed pattern: live taps are now real buttons everywhere (they record your choice directly, like the X-mark votes).
Your reading is a real tendency in English — -ology leans broad-uncovering, -ics leans fenced-specialization, -istry/-etry leans practiced-application. The historical footing is genuinely on your side (Aristotle's -ics book titles = "matters concerning X" = bounded domains; -istry rides on -ist, the practitioner; -etry = measurement).
But it is a tendency, not a rule — and all nine voices converged on one law: SUFFIX ≠ LEVEL. The honest counterexamples, not sanded off: mathematics (broad foundation wearing -ics) · ethics (philosophy, not empirical science) · statistics (a method that crosses every tree, not a fenced tip) · economics / linguistics (-ics wide as whole trees) · cardiology / oncology (-ology as clinical practice — your practice suffix, inverted) · chemistry (-istry, yet a foundational Matter science, not merely applied physics) · optics / hydraulics (subfields *of physics itself*, so -ics can't mean "tip").
The good news: the ruled skill cube already IS the clean version. Kody1's mapping confirms as a lens: -ology ≈ TREE talk, -ics ≈ DOMAIN talk, -istry ≈ the floors (practice dimension, not a third content level). Use the suffixes as the cube's naming texture — the way a field ANNOUNCES its character — while the cube's own levels stay the architecture. One cultural note (Deepy & Seeky): Chinese marks every field with one suffix (学) — this taxonomy is a European artifact, great as design language, wrong as universal law.
| You asked | Answer |
|---|---|
| A word for "study of understanding reality / what already happened"? | No single word exists — a real gap. Nearest: etiology (study of causes/origins — the closest), forensics (reconstructing what happened; legal flavor), historiography (the writing of the past), ontology (being/reality), epistemology (knowing itself). The gap is a clean coinage slot if you want one. |
| A word for "specialization in a field"? | None with a Greek suffix. Plain words: specialty · discipline · subfield. Sharpest existing term of art: idiographic (study of the specific/unique, vs nomothetic = broad-law-seeking — a real, respectable pair). Council lean: don't coin here; the cube's own word DOMAIN already does this job. |
| Broader category all the -ics fall inside? | The cube's BRANCH level — adopted as a design choice, with one caveat kept visible: some -ics (statistics, cybernetics) are METHODS that span branches rather than sit inside one. |
| Where does physics live? | TREE level (Matter), wearing an -ics suffix. Both of your instincts were right at once — and that's exactly why the ruled law is SUFFIX ≠ LEVEL. Aristotle's τὰ φυσικά was broad from the very beginning. |
Both are pronounceable, well-formed, and yours — recorded in the lexicon as Davi coinages (units: praxenes · doxenes). Two landmines to carry knowingly: doxastic is established philosophy (doxastic logic, belief-attitudes since the 1960s) — but that's the same lineage your Doxastic Ratchet paper already deliberately stands on, so it's a borrowing, not a squat. praxastics will be heard as praxis-with-a-suffix (praxis = reflective action in education/philosophy; linguistics also has "praxeme"). Both usable as internal/technical terms; the unit definition of a praxene (a replicable unit of practice? a transmissible skill-move?) wants one sentence of sharpening before it's taught to anyone.
The council was near-unanimous: the taxonomy doesn't order the curriculum — a dependency map does. Your ground-up sequence (periodic table → valence electrons → nucleus → electron field → THEN cells) is captured for the Sciencee lane as its own thing. The suffix lens can explain the order (chemistry applies physics; biology rides both) but doesn't generate it. One honest dissent preserved (Alphabet, 50/50 split): starting children at the atomic scale may not spark engagement — human-scale observation first, mechanics second. Held as a design question for the flow, not a veto. No lab reordering happens until you accept a checked flow.
C:\Users\david\desa\council_runs\council_2026-07-18_122958_256215_30380.md · brief:
docs\briefs\COUNCIL_BRIEF_science-suffix-taxonomy-coherence-check_2026-07-18.md ·
source capture: docs\briefs\CAPTURE_science-suffix-taxonomy-praxastics-doxastics-education-flow_2026-07-18.md
· deGrok's lone dissent not counted as a vote, content mined (it cuts for "lens, not law") ·
coinages recorded in docs\DESA_lexicon.md per the disambiguation rule. — Designeee