Deeper Coherence and Integrated Understanding Across Life Definitions

Determine whether deeper patterns of coherence exist among disciplinary definitions of life and whether a unified, integrated understanding of life can be formulated without sacrificing the specificity of individual disciplinary perspectives.

Background

The paper discusses definitional pluralism—the acceptance of multiple context-dependent definitions of life—as a pragmatic stance in the literature. While this approach acknowledges diverse disciplinary perspectives, it introduces the unresolved issue of whether there are underlying conceptual patterns that connect these definitions.

The authors frame this as an explicit uncertainty about the potential existence of deeper coherence across disciplines and the feasibility of achieving an integrated understanding that retains disciplinary nuance. Their methodological contribution aims to explore this question by mapping expert definitions into a semantic latent space using LLM-driven analysis.