In Frank Herbert’s Consentiency stories, “connectives” are the or an essential physical/metaphysical/linguistic construct used by the Caleban race to account for their perception of existence. At one point “connectives” are desribed as “refined differences”; the point (other than temporal shift) at which an utterly perfect copy is different from the original is one example of a connective as such.
* Whipping Star
* The Dosadi Experiment