The Chaerephon Problem examines the limit of the heteronymic reading proposed in Socrates as Orthonym.
The parent paper models three functions:
The companion paper asks how that model can stop at three if documentary separateness is itself compatible with successful heteronymy.
Its answer is the No-Floor Theorem:
> Under the premise that documentary separateness may be constructed, the heteronymic method has no internal criterion that halts expansion.
Chaerephon is the diagnostic figure because he occupies several verified textual positions: Delphic questioner, comic figure, scene-opening mediator, democratic exile and returnee, and lost-writing Socratic.
The paper separates two levels:
The first may be argued from structure. The second requires evidence and is not asserted.
A heteronymic configuration may function as a symbolon, a broken token recognized by the fit of its parts, whether or not a single agent intentionally “struck” it as such.
Cascading philological failure names the proposed transmission mechanism: each discipline’s inability to adjudicate the heteronymic hypothesis becomes the next relay in the configuration’s survival.
The paper also preserves the rival explanation that missing evidence may create underdetermination without deliberate instrument-defeat. It proposes that a future metric distinguish random gaps from functionally load-bearing gaps.
The ending addresses the receiver as the party who completes the circuit. That performative seal is disclosed, and reception is not presented as proof of a single hidden author.