Constructive Diagnosis: Why Analysis Must Name the Repair

When is a diagnosis actually constructive?This episode of Mechanism Realism examines the difference between describing dysfunction and specifying repair. Much public analysis stops too early: pundits create salience, think tanks produce reports, consultants produce motion. But none of that is repair unless the diagnosis names the missing primitive that would interrupt the failure mechanism.A constructive diagnosis must compile into a repair specification. It has six fields: the failure mechanism, the missing primitive, the owner, the trigger, the wrong-repair warning, and the movement test. Without those fields, the repair space stays infinite, and institutions default to the interventions that preserve their current power.The episode uses CBO, NTSB, NEPA, and the Statistics Finland debt-classification case to show how diagnosis can select the shape of an institution — and how incomplete specifications degrade into compliance rituals, reports, or action-shaped theatre.A repair-side diagnosis has not finished until it names the primitive that would repair it.https://kunnas.com/articles/constructive-diagnosis