Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Plural normative orders
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · John Griffiths, What Is Legal Pluralism? (1986)
Different communities' norms are genuinely in force at once — not one official rulebook plus tolerated deviations, but multiple living systems of rules side by side.
Analysis
The non-collapse half is real: ComPO conditions preference optimization on the community a judgment came from rather than fitting one averaged reward, Modular Pluralism keeps a pool of separately trained community models instead of distilling them into one, and AI-I4 argues on epistemic grounds that distinct world models must not be merged. What is missing is the 'in force' half Griffiths insists on. The orders here are developer-curated statistical portraits installed by training on data about a community, not rule-systems the community authors or administers, and they sit beneath a main model that answers by default and consults the modules; a community absent from the fixed roster has no order at all, which is closer to one official rulebook with modeled variations than to plural living systems.
A conflict rule between orders
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Conflict-of-laws tradition
When two communities' norms disagree about the same case, something must say which governs — and why. That stated rule is what separates real pluralism from mere fragmentation into disconnected groups.
Analysis
Nothing in the cell states which community's norms govern a case both have a claim on, or why. AI-I4's alignment maps and transformation loss measure what is lost when content crosses between two world models — a translation cost, which is a different mechanism from a priority rule and never resolves a disagreement in anyone's favor. Modular Pluralism's main model fuses or collates module outputs, but aggregation is not adjudication, and in steerable mode the user naming a community is a selector rather than a stated ground of authority; ComPO's community tag switches behavior with no notion of overlapping claims. No source asserts a conflict rule, and AI-I4 is explicit that it supplies none.
A shared floor
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859)
Accommodation of group differences has a limit stated in advance — classically Mill's harm principle: your practices are your business until they harm others. Without an enforced floor, pluralism collapses into "each group gets whatever it wants".
Analysis
No paper states, in advance, a limit on what a community's trained voice may endorse. ComPO's objective will fit whatever preferences a community's data expresses, Modular Pluralism's architecture treats every community module symmetrically, and CommunityBench scores fidelity to community-level differences without testing any floor those differences must respect. AI-I4 pushes the other way: its case for preserving distinct world models is that each retains error-detection capacity the others lack, an argument that resists imposing a common minimum rather than supplying one. Whatever refusal behavior the base model carries is inherited safety training, not a stated harm limit, and no source advertises one.