The Method Stance (reverberation not coordination)
How a recurrence is read. An idea can appear again and again without a single mind arranging it.
The two documented paths
An idea reaches a later mind two ways that leave a trail. Working-off: someone reads, or is taught by, an earlier source, and extends it — Vogler off Campbell’s published book, Bernays off his uncle Freud, Wells taught by Huxley in a lecture hall. Same-field: separate people reach the same idea in a shared climate with no contact — the four idioms of the elect across seventy years, or the Galtonian tradition an American tester breathes without a line of citation. A recurrence with neither path documented is left as a resemblance, and no more.
What contact usually shows
Where the record does put these people in one room, it tends to show a quarrel rather than a plan: Russell resigning from the Coefficients, Wells losing his bid for the Fabian Society, Dewey answering Lippmann in a book of his own. Contact is cited together with the disagreement it produced, or it is not cited as agreement at all.
Role in the thesis
The lens applied to every edge in the graph: each connection carries its transmission status, and a recurrence is never inflated into a coordinated one. It is the discipline that lets a real pattern be shown without a hidden hand being invented to explain it.
Referenced by. Where this entry is cited in the reading — hover any to read it in place.