AIM Framework glossary
Nested-Foam Property
Canonical definition
The Nested-Foam Property is the property of the Bubble-and-Foam Model by which any bubble may itself be partitioned into finer bubbles by finer Boundary-Beliefs, recursively and to arbitrary depth. Nesting introduces no new mechanism: it is the Model's partitioning applied to a domain already formed, using Boundary-Beliefs of the same kind at every level, so that the same construct generates the domain, its sub-domains, and their sub-domains in turn. Its only consequence for containment is one of scale, a collapse may be held at a fine membrane or, as successively coarser Boundary-Beliefs decohere, escalate from sub-domain to domain to the Belief-space at large, taking a wider region at each level whose separating Belief has failed.
Explanation
Bubbles sit inside bubbles. Psychology is one bubble, and inside it the subfields (clinical, cognitive, social) are smaller bubbles walled off from each other; economics is a bubble containing the neoclassical, behavioural, and Austrian schools as bubbles within it. Nothing new is needed to get this nesting: the same kind of wall that separates whole fields also separates the schools inside a field, just drawn finer. That is really the point of noting it, the foam picture is parsimonious. A single idea, the maintained Boundary-Belief, builds the whole structure at every scale, and it also tells you how far a collapse spreads: contained to one school if the fine walls hold, spreading to the whole field only as the outer walls give way.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct. Descriptive property of the Bubble-and-Foam Model; not independently load-bearing.
Derivation
Also in the entry
Source: Chapter 14, Section 14.9.1.