AIM Framework glossary
Disciplinary Priors
Canonical definition
**Disciplinary Priors are the foundational assumptions within each academic discipline that independently block recognition of Mimetic Desire as a distinct motivational source, economics assumes preference exogeneity (preferences are given, not to be explained); psychology assumes introspective reliability (subjects can accurately report their motivations); philosophy assumes autonomous selfhood (desires originate within the individual); law assumes individual intentionality (actions reflect deliberate choice); religion assumes volitional corrective capacity (moral effort can overcome covetousness). These priors interlocked into a self-reinforcing structure where questioning any single prior required simultaneously questioning all others. Layer 4 of the Camouflage Architecture.
Explanation
Each discipline's prior is independently reasonable within its own framework (the problem is not that any single prior is obviously wrong, but that together they form a closed system. Economics need not explain where preferences come from to build elegant models; psychology can proceed by taking self-report at face value; philosophy can discuss agency without neuroscience. The priors interlock because they share a common unstated assumption: that the question "where do desires come from?" either has an obvious answer (they come from the individual) or is not worth asking (they are exogenous parameters). AIM's claim is that this question is the most important unanswered question in the human sciences, and that the priors' mutual reinforcement is itself predicted by the Camouflage Architecture) the priors feel self-evident because the architecture that would reveal them as inadequate was itself concealed. See Camouflage Architecture, Disciplinary Boundaries, Triple Camouflage. Source-channel specification. Each disciplinary prior architecturally forecloses M-attribution at its foundation: economics (preference exogeneity forecloses M-transmission of preferences); psychology (introspective reliability forecloses M-driven misattribution); philosophy (autonomous selfhood forecloses M-constituted desire); religion (covetousness as moral failure forecloses M-as-architectural). The pattern is uniform: each discipline’s foundational prior excludes the M-channel from the representable Hypothesis Space, producing the interlocking concealment structure formalised as Layer 4 of the Camouflage Architecture. The Disciplinary Priors are therefore an M-foreclosure architecture operating through A-and-I-comfortable foundational assumptions.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.