Stratify is the act of organizing determination in a well-founded order: ensuring that each level of a relational configuration is settled before the next is built upon it. It is the prerequisite for checking whether a configuration is constructible.
Stratify arises in Movement IV: Geometric Cohesion when relational configurations must be organized layer by layer. Multiple relational units coexist at different levels of determination. Some depend on others; some are independent. Stratification reorganizes a configuration so that each part’s determination depends only on what has already been determined at earlier stages. This directed propagation — settling things in order rather than all at once — provides the well-founded basis for asking whether the parts genuinely constitute each other.
Without stratification, the question of mutual determination has no ground to stand on. If everything depends on everything else simultaneously, there is no way to check whether the dependencies are coherent. Stratify breaks this circularity by introducing a directed order of determination while preserving the relational content.
Mathematical correspondence
Stratify corresponds to a Reedy-style fibrant replacement — reorganizing a diagram indexed by a site so that values propagate along the directed structure of the indexing category.
Related
- Constructible — the condition that holds after stratification stabilizes
- Ambidextrous — the property that follows from constructibility