The Justification Maze: why ontology does not take hold in the Standard Model and must be sought in direct data

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

What this compendium establishes, and what it does not It establishes that, in all recorded attempts to extract from the Standard Model a usable ontological assertion (what things are, and not merely how much they measure), the path ended in one of three outcomes: a number read from an apparatus, a conditional mathematical necessity, or an entity that cannot be isolated experimentally. None of these outcomes provides ontological foundation. It also establishes that accelerator data reach the literature partially processed by the theory itself, which forces one to descend to the detector layer. It does not establish that the Standard Model is wrong, that its predictions are false, or that the MFC is correct. §6 declares the counter-arguments that survive, without attenuation. Record of origin: the positions on the standard side were defended by an AI assistant (Claude, Anthropic) throughout the dialogue. The concessions recorded below were made by it, in the dialogue itself, in the face of the author's objections.