AIM Framework glossary
Unresolved Plurality Principle
Canonical definition
The Unresolved Plurality Principle is the generalised-probability result that an Individual sustains an effectively unbounded range of mutually incompatible held Hypotheses because consistency between Hypotheses is enforced only locally, at a Decoherence event that brings a specific pair into a common measurement context, and the Decoherence events that would be required to resolve the overwhelming majority of pairwise incompatibilities never occur. Incompatible Hypotheses are held in superposition rather than in a resolved joint assignment; a contradiction between two of them is not merely undetected but unconstituted until a measurement pairs them, because the joint distribution over the pair has not been formed. The indeterminacy is epistemic, not ontic: the state of affairs is determinately settled in the world, and what is unresolved is only whether the Individual has undergone the Decoherence event that delivers that settlement to them. The Unresolved Plurality Principle rests on two distinct conditions. The first is that most Hypothesis-pairs are never measured jointly, so their joint distribution remains undefined, the dominant case, and the one that produces the sheer scale of the effect. The second is that some Hypothesis-pairs are genuinely non-commuting, such that no simultaneous sharp joint assignment exists even in principle and the pair resolves differently according to the order of questioning, the condition that makes the Unresolved Plurality Principle a non-classical result rather than a description of incomplete bookkeeping. The Unresolved Plurality Principle is the Belief-store-scale reading of the same non-commutativity that produces order and context effects at the scale of a single pair, and it is orthogonal to Coupling Strength: Coupling Strength governs the direction toward which a Decoherence event resolves a Hypothesis, whereas the Unresolved Plurality Principle governs whether any Decoherence event resolves a given pair at all.
Explanation
People carry an enormous number of Beliefs, and plenty of them flatly contradict each other, yet this almost never feels like strain. The reason is that two Beliefs only clash at the moment something forces you to hold them up against each other, and for almost every pair of Beliefs you have, that moment never comes. Until it does, the contradiction is not being ignored, it has not been formed yet. There is simply no occasion that puts the two Beliefs in the same room. Because the occasions that would reconcile all your Beliefs are vastly fewer than the Beliefs themselves, the range of things a person can simultaneously hold is, for practical purposes, limitless. It is not that people tolerate known contradictions; it is that the collisions that would create the contradictions mostly never happen.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle.