Essays and extras
The longer pieces: the essays on each subject, the word this ledger is built on, what the ledger is for, the empiriceme about empiricemes, and a catalogue of the thought experiments it cannot file.
empiriceme /ɛmˈpɪrɪsiːm/ · em-PIRR-i-seem noun
The smallest unit of noticing that travels: a claim about how people and institutions tend to behave, short enough to quote whole and usually carrying a name. Its truth is a separate question from its existence.
Greek empeiria, experience, with -eme, the suffix of minimal distinctive units — phoneme, morpheme, lexeme, mytheme. Both elements are Greek and the compound is regular.
This ledger files items of incompatible logical types. A theorem is proved, a regularity is measured, a model is argued for, a maxim is urged, and an adage is merely apt. No noun in ordinary use covers all five without doing violence to some of them.
Every available candidate smuggles in a verdict. Law overclaims for every adage here. Heuristic and principle each name one register out of four. Finding implies evidence that a good many entries here do not have. Meme imports a theory of transmission this ledger takes no position on. What was wanted was a term that names the unit without grading it, because grading is what the register colour does, and it does it separately.
Linguistics settled this problem long ago. A phoneme is a unit of analysis rather than a unit of merit, and so are the morpheme, the lexeme and Lévi-Strauss's mytheme. The suffix marks the smallest thing that can be isolated and compared, and says nothing about whether the thing is any good. That is precisely the work required here.
The word does not dignify what it names. An empiriceme is defined by its portability, and portability is a fact about language rather than about the world. Several of the most widely travelled entries in this ledger are among the least supported, which is rather the point: the term is an instrument for filing, not a warrant.