A Jurisdictionalist Metaphysics of Collective Rebellion

This paper develops a Jurisdictionalist metaphysics of human social systems through an analysis of propositional agency, normative priority, obligation, authority, jurisdiction, institutional continuity, and collective rebellion. Its governing thesis is that human social systems are historically extended structures of derivative propositional agency operating within normative conditions and jurisdictions they neither exhaustively constitute nor escape. Such systems are neither metaphysically autonomous entities nor mere aggregates of individuals. They can encode, preserve, operationalise, enforce, and transmit propositions beyond the intentions and lifetimes of their originating agents without thereby becoming independent personal subjects. The argument begins by distinguishing reality, propositions about reality, and propositional agents situated within reality. It then develops the thesis that human normative practices are not normatively self-sufficient: the validity conditions by which practices, judgments, and institutions are assessed cannot be exhaustively constituted by those same practices, judgments, and institutions. From this follows a distinction between the normative possibility of legitimate bindingness and the generation of particular obligations. The paper then subjects rival accounts of normative grounding to Jurisdictionalist pressure. Brute normative realism, Kantian rationalism, natural teleology, evolutionary naturalism, and antifoundationalism each explain important features of normative life, yet each must answer a further question: what establishes not merely normative content, rational coherence, flourishing, causal origin, or social stability, but rightful binding authority? A final synthesis argues that these theories either explain the content of norms without adequately explaining the standing by which they bind, or else reintroduce normative authority through concepts whose jurisdictional force remains unexplained. Jurisdiction is therefore developed as a distinct category concerned with the legitimate scope within which an agent or institution possesses standing to issue, interpret, apply, or enforce binding judgments. From this follows a general Jurisdictionalist theorem: no increase in knowledge, power, consensus, utility, longevity, institutional recognition, social acceptance, technological capacity, or procedural regularity can, by itself, generate jurisdictional authority. The paper then develops Propositional Scaling as a conditional model explaining how propositions may pass from individual judgment through action, repetition, convention, norm, institutionalisation, enforcement, and inheritance. A completed worked example involving predictive technological bureaucracy shows how a true proposition may become the basis of jurisdictional overreach, how that overreach becomes a counterfeit court, how it affects concrete agents, and how its logic becomes historically inherited. 1 Finally, the paper develops the thesis of parasitic rebellion: rebellious systems cannot abolish truth, identity, regularity, obligation, authority, trust, or normative distinction while remaining intelligible as social systems. This explains both the possibility of genuine reform and the impossibility of structural self-redemption. The argument culminates, confessionally and subject to the grounding argument developed herein, in the claim that all derivative jurisdictions finally stand before the original jurisdiction of the Logos. The governing question of Jurisdictionalism is therefore not merely what human systems judge, but by what standin