Closure

Canonical definition

Closure is the second of the three conditions a candidate Institutional Buffer must satisfy to qualify as a Restoring Node: the new state variable's feedback must act on one of the couplings whose product forms the Internal Loop Gain, or on the corresponding network-scale quantities. A structure whose restoring force acts on a coordinate the loop does not contain fails Closure however genuine and however strong that force is, and the failure is not offset by the structure's importance in other respects. Two-party electoral alternation is the worked case: its restoring force acts on office-holding, which appears in no term of the loop gain, so the loop drives the electoral variable while the electoral variable supplies no damping in return. Social insurance is the complementary case, carrying genuine responsive dynamics aimed at appetitive provision, which is an exogenous input to the valuation equation rather than a term in the gain. Distinction from Cognitive Closure. Cognitive Closure is a state of an Individual's causal-inference process, reached when an explanation has been generated and accepted so that downstream processing can proceed. Closure in the present sense is a property of a feedback path in a dynamical system and concerns where a variable's output lands. The two share a word and nothing else, and neither entry bears on the other.