Crypto-Externalism in Structural Minimalism: A Through-Line Failure, with an Incidental Demonstration of Experiential Empiricism's Novelty

A recent corpus of eleven papers (Skarbek 2025-2026) deploys a single recurring methodology against a set of targets that include qualia, solipsism, dualism, modal moral necessity, absolute totalities, the epistemic privilege of experience, and the reification of information. The methodology is uniform: introduce "minimal structural conditions" on a class of concepts (causal role, distinguishable difference, conditions of application and failure, registration across states, model-theoretic interpretability, persistence of consequences), declare these conditions ontologically neutral and domain-independent, and conclude that the targeted concept fails to satisfy them. This paper identifies a single through-line failure in that methodology. The conditions are not ontologically neutral. Each is interpretable only against a third-person, structural, observer-independent baseline that is presupposed rather than argued for. The result is a recurring move that I will call *crypto-externalism*: the reintroduction of an externalist frame at exactly the methodological level where neutrality is being claimed. Once this move is identified, the corpus splits into two readings. On the first reading, the corpus is engaging Experiential Empiricism (EE), in which case the through-line failure is decisive against it. On the second reading, the corpus is engaging only classical idealist, dualist, and phenomenalist targets, in which case its arguments do not reach EE at all. Either reading entails that EE occupies conceptual territory the corpus does not engage. The paper closes by specifying what a real refutation of EE would have to look like, and noting that the corpus does not contain one.