Irreducible Human — Cross-Tradition Coding Matrix (Supplementary Material)

Cite this dataset: Smárason, M. & Guttesen, K. (2026). Cross-Tradition Coding Matrix: Nineteen Traditions against Seven Capacities [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21472630

Citable supplementary data for The Irreducible Human (Smárason & Guttesen). The falsifiability artifact behind the book's cross-civilisational convergence claim: nineteen traditions coded against seven capacity categories, with per-capacity tallies, an inter-rater-reliability check, and the excluded candidates.

coding-matrix.csv is the machine-readable matrix. The narrative below documents method, tallies, reliability, exclusions, and provenance.

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Online Supplementary Material — Cross-Tradition Coding Matrix

The Irreducible Human (Smárason & Guttesen). Supplement to Chapter Synthesis: The Irreducible Core (@sec-synthesis) and The Cognitive Threshold (@sec-cognitive-threshold).

This document is the falsifiability artifact behind the book's convergence claim: nineteen civilisational traditions coded against seven capacity categories. It exists so a reader can check, cell by cell, the claim that seven capacities recur across independent traditions, and can see which candidate capacities were considered and excluded.

Method (the coding bar)

A capacity is counted as convergent only where at least four independent traditions institutionalise it, independence judged by separation in geography and chronology and the absence of a known channel of transmission between them. Appearances driven by instrumental rather than intrinsic value were down-weighted, and every retained convergence was passed through an adversarial challenge before it was kept (the challenge and counter-research are preserved in resources/civilizational-research/12_adversarial_challenge.md and 13_adversarial_counter_research.md).

The bar is a threshold choice, not a law; the authors concede in the adversarial record that "four and not six" is a stipulation. The five civilisational constants named in the print text use a higher internal bar (attested in 8+ traditions) and are a subset of the seven capacities below.

Coding scale. For each (tradition × capacity) cell:

• I — Institutionalised: the tradition has an explicit institution, practice, canonical text, or named concept cultivating the capacity.
• P — Partial: present but informal, implicit, or contested; no dedicated institution.
• — — Absent or unattested in the record for that tradition (in some cases, as with the Industrial West, actively eroded rather than merely absent).

The seven capacities

• A Foundational Cognitive Capacities (literacy, numeracy, logical reasoning, sustained attention, memory)
• B Practical Judgment / Phronesis (situational judgment, knowing when to deviate from rules, experience-based pattern recognition)
• C Ethical and Moral Formation (virtue, moral reasoning, responsibility, integrity inseparable from competence)
• D Communicative Competence (clear, honest, persuasive expression; rhetoric; register; deliberation)
• E Embodied and Tacit Knowledge (craft skill, physical discipline, aesthetic and clinical judgment, environmental attunement)
• F Critical Evaluation (source and validity assessment, bias recognition, distinguishing knowledge from pseudo-knowledge)
• G Self-Knowledge and Metacognition (epistemic humility, knowing one's own limits, reflective monitoring)

The matrix (19 traditions × 7 capacities)

#	Tradition	A	B	C	D	E	F	G
1	Mesopotamia	I	I	I	I	P	P	P
2	Egypt	I	I	I	I	P	P	I
3	Early China (Shang)	I	P	P	P	I	—	—
4	Classical Greece	I	I	I	I	P	I	I
5	Rome	I	I	I	I	P	P	P
6	Classical China	I	I	I	I	I	P	P
7	Classical India	I	I	I	P	I	I	I
8	Islamic Golden Age	I	I	I	I	P	I	I
9	Medieval Europe	I	P	I	I	P	I	I
10	Tang/Song China	I	P	I	I	P	P	I
11	Ming China	I	P	I	I	P	—	I
12	Renaissance Europe	I	I	I	I	I	I	I
13	Enlightenment	I	I	I	I	P	I	I
14	Industrial West	I	—	P	P	—	P	P
15	Tokugawa Japan	I	P	I	I	I	P	P
16	Mesoamerica (Nahua)	I	P	I	I	P	P	P
17	African Traditions	I	I	I	I	I	P	P
18	Pacific / Oceanian	I	I	P	P	I	P	P
19	Practitioner Traditions	I	I	P	P	I	I	I

Tallies — does each capacity clear the bar?

Count of traditions institutionalising (I) each capacity, out of 19. The convergence bar is 4.

Capacity	I count	Clears bar (≥4)?	Note
A Foundational Cognitive	19	Yes	Universal; every literate or oral-transmission tradition institutionalises it
C Ethical / Moral Formation	15	Yes	Strongest of all; near-universal
D Communicative Competence	14	Yes	Strong
B Practical Judgment / Phronesis	12	Yes	Strong; the Industrial West is the one erosion case (—)
G Self-Knowledge / Metacognition	10	Yes	Strong
E Embodied / Tacit Knowledge	8	Yes	Thinnest and most frame-sensitive (see excluded candidate (c)); craft/practitioner-weighted
F Critical Evaluation	7	Yes	Clears the historical bar; carried additionally by the modern empirical record

All seven clear the four-tradition bar. E (8) and F (7) are the thinnest, and are the honest soft points a critic should press first. The Industrial West is coded as a deficit case (B and E marked —), consistent with the book's thesis that industrialism separated skill from judgment; Ming China's F is — because its examination system actively narrowed source-critical judgment to a single canonised commentary.

Excluded candidates (what did NOT make the seven)

Candidate capacities considered and set aside, each because it appears in essentially a single lineage, reduces to a variant of an existing capacity, or is an artefact of a coding frame built largely from literate traditions. Sources are the adversarial research files.

Candidate	Lineage / count	Why excluded	Source
Obedience-conditioning (Spartan agoge)	One (Sparta)	A rival theory of moral formation, not a distinct capacity; reduces to a variant of C	12_adversarial_challenge.md; 13_adversarial_counter_research.md
Enforcement-through-law / rule-based statecraft (Chinese Legalism, Qin)	One full implementation (Qin)	Deliberate outlier that abandoned moral formation and collapsed within ~15 years; confirmatory of C, not additive	12_adversarial_challenge.md; 13_adversarial_counter_research.md
Elaborate cosmological / genealogical knowledge (Polynesian cosmology, griot genealogy)	A few oral traditions, heterogeneous	Real content that the seven-slot frame (derived from literate traditions) has no convergent slot for; the coding-frame artefact case, and the reason E is frame-sensitive	12_adversarial_challenge.md
Rhetoric-as-competitive-skill (Sophist model)	One (Greek Sophists)	Single-lineage; folds back into D (Communicative Competence) once character is re-included	12_adversarial_challenge.md; 13_adversarial_counter_research.md
Rote memorisation as an end in itself	Several, as a means	Down-weighted to an instrument of A and G (the memorisation was the formation), not retained as a distinct capacity	11_synthesis.md; 14_ultimate_synthesis.md

Contemplative/mystical self-observation is not an excluded candidate: it was absorbed into G (via Sufi muraqaba, Vedanta, Wang Yangming) rather than dropped.

Inter-rater reliability

To check that the matrix reflects the evidence rather than one coder's idiosyncrasy, a second coder coded all nineteen traditions against all seven capacities independently, working from the same primary research files without sight of the coding above. Agreement across the 133 cells:

• Three-way agreement (I / P / —): 86.5 per cent (115 of 133 cells), Cohen's kappa = 0.71 (substantial agreement).
• Binary agreement (I versus not-I, the decision that determines which capacities clear the four-tradition bar): 88.7 per cent (118 of 133), Cohen's kappa = 0.75 (substantial agreement).

Per-capacity three-way agreement: A 89%, B 84%, C 89%, D 84%, E 89%, F 89%, G 79%. Self-Knowledge and Metacognition (G) is the noisiest capacity to code, which is unsurprising, since it is the most interpretive.

The eighteen disagreements fall almost entirely on the institutionalised-versus-partial (I/P) boundary rather than on presence-versus-absence, and, decisively for the convergence claim, none of them drops a capacity below the four-tradition bar under either coder. Both independent codings return the same seven convergent capacities, with embodied/tacit knowledge (E) and critical evaluation (F) the thinnest under both. A kappa in the 0.71 to 0.75 range is what honest independent coding of contested cross-tradition material produces; it is reported here rather than smoothed toward a suspicious near-unity, and the full second coding is available on request for anyone who wishes to audit individual cells.

Provenance and limits

The coding above synthesises the primary research compiled in resources/civilizational-research/ (fifteen files: era studies, non-Western and practitioner studies, an adversarial challenge, a counter-research pass, and two syntheses) and the machine-readable ontology HUMAN_knowledge-graph.jsonld (19 traditions, 7 capacity categories, 34 sub-capacities, 5 constants). It is the authors' reading of that record, produced under the evidence-driven method described in the book's methodology chapter, not a neutral finding standing outside interpretation. The cells reflect what the research record attests; where the record is thin (e.g. Tokugawa B/F/G, the oral traditions' F/G), cells are marked P rather than inflated to I.

Corrections and challenges to individual cells are welcome and are exactly the point of publishing the matrix: the claim is now checkable cell by cell.