What PLITO cannot do.
A framework that teaches scrutiny owes its users scrutiny of itself. These are the known boundaries, tensions, and open questions — stated plainly, kept current, and treated as part of the framework rather than footnotes to it.
01PLITO is a heuristic, not a formalism.
The framework discloses; it does not compute or predict. Earlier explorations of mathematical formalisations (functions, derivatives over the variables) are best understood as conceptual metaphors, not operations. Presenting them as more would borrow the authority of mathematics without doing its work. The framework's validation is practical: does it reliably produce richer seeing? That claim is testable, and it is the only claim made.
02The categories overlap by design — and that costs precision.
A factory is techne, object, and site of labour at once. The five variables are lenses, not boxes: the same element of a situation legitimately appears under several. This is a strength for human analysis and a serious obstacle to any automated classification. Anyone tempted to build hard-boundary tagging on top of PLITO should expect the categories to resist.
03The framework has a position.
PLITO descends from Western critical theory. Its instinct to look for hidden power, invisible labour, and naturalised ideas is itself an idea — constructed, with a lineage, carrying commitments. Applied across cultures without reconstruction, it risks imposing the very kind of unexamined frame it teaches users to detect. Users from other intellectual traditions are not asked to adopt PLITO's categories; they are invited to contest and rebuild them.
04Directed questioning is not open inquiry.
The five questions point somewhere. A framework that asks "whose labour is invisible?" has already decided that invisible labour matters. This is defensible — every method directs attention — but it means PLITO's questioning is structured, not neutral, and should never be presented as purely Socratic. The honest formulation: PLITO offers a particular discipline of attention, openly, for users to take up or refuse.
05Awareness is not action.
Seeing a structure does not change it. The path from analysis to behaviour runs through urgency, social support, and practice in context — none of which a framework supplies. PLITO can sharpen the seeing; what is done with it happens elsewhere, with other people.
06The observer changes the observed — including here.
Every PLITO analysis is made by someone, from somewhere. Categorising a situation shapes how it is subsequently seen; analysing people can change how they behave. This is why every analysis on this site ends with the meta-question turned on itself, and why the framework's standing test remains: use PLITO on PLITO. Who designed it, doing what labour, assuming what ideas, with what tools, producing what objects — and does it survive its own scrutiny? This page is the ongoing answer.
07Open questions.
Whether the I-eco / I-con / I-hybrid taxonomy holds up under sustained philosophical pressure; whether the framework can be meaningfully validated against alternatives; how it should be reconstructed by users outside its tradition of origin; and what, if anything, of it can responsibly be computationally assisted. These are live, not settled. Progress on them will be documented here.