A.5:1 - Problem frame

FPF helps practitioners combine shared conceptual grounds and reusable methods with suitable domain methods. FPF can support that use across changing disciplines only if it:

• (i) remains stable and self‑consistent over multi‑decade timespans;
• (ii) invites, rather than resists, the continual influx of new disciplinary knowledge; and
• (iii) allows multiple, even competing, explanatory lenses to coexist without forcing a “winner‑takes‑all” unification.

Historically, grand “total” ontologies—Aristotle’s Categories, Carnap’s Logical Construction of the World, Bunge’s TOE—failed precisely because each tried to embed every domain’s primitives directly into a single monolith. Once the monolith cracked under domain pressure, the whole edifice became unmaintainable.