Language, meaning, and reasons. Language Games and Family Resemblance (Wittgenstein) ground gestalt recognition in practice; deliberation’s normativity can draw on Habermas’s discourse ethics and public justification in Deliberative Democracy:
- Philisophical Investigtions - wikipedia 
- Family Resemblance - wikipedia
- wikipedia
- wikipedia
Cultural evolution and path dependence. Cultural transmission, shared intentionality, and the “ratchet effect” motivate why memetic units matter; Waddington’s epigenetic landscape offers a classic path-dependence metaphor; Assembly Theory reframes identity via formation histories. wikipedia wikipedia nature
Dialogue formalization. Dialogue Games and Speech Acts supply atomic interactional moves; Abstract Argumentation provides attack/support structure; BDI/planning architectures motivate inner operators for option-generation, weighing reasons, and intention formation. wikipedia wikipedia wikipedia
Living scholarship. Living Documents and the Living Reviews tradition supply the updateable publishing substrate and precedent for continuously revised guides. wikipedia wikipedia
Design ethics and planetary limits. Value Sensitive Design and Design Justice inform inclusion, accountability, and care; planetary boundaries set the ecological frame within which governance must operate. wikipedia designjustice.org wikipedia
Policy-as-code and operational governance. Treat rules and commitments as testable, versioned artifacts; use policy engines to enforce gates like Boundary Proof and obligation checks like Care Ledger. openpolicyagent.org
--- Short answer: what we’ve been building together is a synthesis. I’m drawing on a bunch of mature literatures (philosophy of language, cultural evolution, deliberative democracy, HCI/design, policy-as-code, and “living” scholarship), plus some recent work in multi-agent AI. The specific notions of **Deliberative Primitives**, **Guides** as **\[\[Living Documents]]**, and the concrete patterns we named (role-swap, care ledgers, premortems, etc.) are new combinations I’m proposing; they’re inspired by, but not copied from, the sources below. Here are the main pillars and representative sources: * # Language, meaning, and reasons * Wittgenstein’s **family resemblance** and **language games** anchor our “gestalt” / pattern-recognition angle. (Standard reference: *Philosophical Investigations*; modern overviews often frame it this way.) * Habermas’ **discourse ethics**: every serious speech act raises testable claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity — the backbone for reason-giving in deliberation. ([Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy][1]) * # Cultural evolution, memetics, and path dependence * Cultural transmission, shared intentionality, and the “ratchet effect” (how know-how accumulates) — Tomasello et al.; Premack & Woodruff for early **theory of mind** framing. ([PMC][2]) * Waddington on **canalization** / epigenetic landscapes as a classic way to talk about path dependence. ([PNAS][3]) * # Deliberative democracy & dialogue games * Deliberation as a norm-guided practice (Gutmann & Thompson) and reasoning under public justification (Habermas). ([ResearchGate][4]) * Formal dialogue & argumentation (Walton & Krabbe; Dung’s abstract argumentation) inform the “primitive” as a reusable interaction unit. ([PhilPapers][5]) * # “Living” scholarship & living documents * **Living Reviews** (founded at Max Planck’s AEI in 1998): the canonical precedent for continuously updated scientific reviews. ([aei.mpg.de][6]) * **Living systematic reviews** (Cochrane/BMJ): methodology for constantly refreshed evidence. ([PMC][7]) * C2 wiki’s long-running notion of a **Living Document** in software/knowledge work. ([wiki.c2.com][8]) * # Design ethics and human-centred practice * **Value Sensitive Design** (Friedman et al.) and **Design Justice** (Costanza-Chock) support our “care, inclusion, and accountability” constraints baked into the primitives. ([research.cs.vt.edu][9]) * # Planetary constraints for governance goals * **Planetary boundaries** and “safe & just” operating spaces frame why our deliberation must be ecologically literate. (Rockström et al.; Steffen et al.; updates.) ([Nature][10]) * # Policy-as-code (operational substrate for \[\[Living Documents]]) * Open Policy Agent and the broader PaC pattern justify treating rules/commitments as testable, versioned artifacts — the “CI/CD for policy” analogy. ([Open Policy Agent][11]) * # Multi-agent AI, empathy/TOM, and “agentic space” * Early **machine theory of mind** and **AI-via-debate** show why multi-agent setups are promising for scalable oversight and richer, socialized learning — the bridge to your “vectors in agentic space.” (The idea is still emerging; these are touchstones rather than proofs.) ([Proceedings of Machine Learning Research][12]) * # Practical micro-patterns we referenced * **Rapoport’s rules / steelmanning** (Dennett popularization) and **premortems** (Gary Klein) as tried-and-tested deliberative moves we adapted into primitives. ([RationalWiki][13]) * # On “assembly” and selection of cultural units * **Assembly Theory** (Walker & Cronin) as a useful metaphor for why robust, copyable structures (our primitives) matter for selection and spread. (Active debate, but relevant intuition.) ([SciSpace][14]) What’s **new** here (and therefore not directly sourced) are: the precise definition of a **Deliberative Primitive** as a *gestalt* unit of selection in memetic/agentic space; its dual legibility to humans and AIs via family-resemblance patterns; and its implementation inside **\[\[Living Documents]]** that embed metrics, norms, and updatable policy-as-code. Those are original syntheses built atop the literatures above. If you want, I can turn this into a compact reference section inside your guide (with short annotations per source) or expand any category with more primary papers. [1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Jürgen Habermas - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" [2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2865079/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative ..." [3]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.102303999?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Waddington's canalization revisited: Developmental ..." [4]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288620805_Why_Deliberative_Democracy?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Why Deliberative Democracy?" [5]: https://philpapers.org/rec/WALCID?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Commitment in Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal ..." [6]: https://www.aei.mpg.de/189086/living-reviews-in-relativity-10th-anniversary-for-pioneering-project-in-electronic-publishing?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Living Reviews in Relativity - Albert Einstein Institute" [7]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7542271/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Living Systematic Reviews and Other Approaches for Updating ..." [8]: https://wiki.c2.com/?LivingDocument=&utm_source=chatgpt.com "Living Document" [9]: https://research.cs.vt.edu/ns/cs5724papers/6.theoriesofuse.cwaandvsd.friedman.vsd.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Value Sensitive Design: Theory and Methods" [10]: https://www.nature.com/articles/461472a?utm_source=chatgpt.com "A safe operating space for humanity" [11]: https://openpolicyagent.org/docs?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Introduction" [12]: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/rabinowitz18a/rabinowitz18a.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Machine Theory of Mind" [13]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Rapoport%27s_Rules?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Rapoport's Rules" [14]: https://scispace.com/pdf/assembly-theory-explains-and-quantifies-the-emergence-of-8syt8ox1.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com "assembly-theory-explains-and-quantifies-the-emergence- ..."
# Deliberative Democracy & Argumentation
- AI can help humans find common ground
- DeepMind – Habermas Machine project
- AI tool helps opposing views find common ground
- The GovLab – Peacemaking Machine
- Can AI mediation improve deliberation?
- Mass online deliberation – review (2022)
- To Play Is the Thing (game design for deliberation)
- Pol.is – platform
- Pol.is – intro & knowledge base
- vTaiwan – overview
- vTaiwan – case study
- LLMs + Pol.is – opportunities & risks
# Cultural Evolution & Memetics
- Machine Culture – NHB perspective (2023)
- Wittgenstein – family resemblance
- Cultural Evolution – overview (Henrich)
- Shared intentionality – edited volume
# Living Documents & Knowledge Infrastructure
- Living Reviews in Relativity – journal home
- Max Planck – Living Reviews background
- BMJ – Living systematic reviews (editorial)
- BMJ – PRISMA for living reviews (2024)
- Cochrane – Living systematic reviews
- OECD – Rules as Code primer
- Open Policy Agent – policy-as-code docs
# Generative AI in Multi-Agent Deliberation
- Meta CICERO – Diplomacy agent
- CICERO – Science paper (2022)
- Generative Agents – arXiv (2023)
- OpenAI – Democratic Inputs to AI
- Anthropic – Collective Constitutional AI
- Collective Constitutional AI – preprint
- AI Safety via Debate – arXiv
- Machine Theory of Mind – arXiv
# Design Justice, Care Ethics & Planetary Boundaries
- Planetary boundaries – update (2023)
- Doughnut Economics – design tool
- Kate Raworth – TED talk
- AI + Doughnut Economics – seminar