Ontological Leakage and the Failure of Translation Across Multi-Topos Systems A Structural Account of Non-Compositionality in Descriptive Frameworks

Abstract This paper develops a structural account of ontological leakage as a limitation on translation between heterogeneous descriptive systems. Departing from strong commensurability assumptions in philosophy of science, it is argued that certain translation failures arise from incompatibilities in inferential structure, temporal organization, and conditions of compositionality across systems. Building on work on incommensurability (Kuhn, 1962; Quine, 1960) and localized coordination (Galison, 1997), a three-level framework—structural, material, and network—is introduced. These levels are interpreted as interacting regimes of representation rather than ontologically distinct domains. Ontological leakage is defined as the failure of structure-preserving mappings across such regimes. A case study in distributed computational systems is used to illustrate the model. The paper concludes with a minimal subject-theoretic interpretation in which subjectivity is understood as a stable pattern emerging from persistent non-equivalence between descriptive domains. Keywords: incommensurability, philosophy of science, translation, category theory, systems theory, subjectivity摘要 本文针对异构描述系统间翻译的局限性，构建了本体渗漏（ontological leakage）的结构性阐释。不同于科学哲学中的强可通约性假设，本文指出，部分翻译失效源于不同系统在推理结构、时间组织与组合性条件上的不相容性。本文基于不可通约性（incommensurability）相关研究（Kuhn, 1962; Quine, 1960）以及局部协调（Galison, 1997）相关成果，提出了包含结构层、物质层与网络层的三级框架，并将这些层级阐释为相互作用的表征机制，而非本体论上独立的领域。本体渗漏被定义为跨此类层级的保结构映射失效。本文以分布式计算系统为案例研究对该模型进行阐释，最后以最小主体论视角进行总结，将主体性理解为描述域间持续非等价性所涌现出的稳定模式。 关键词：不可通约性、科学哲学、翻译、范畴论、系统论、主体性