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To resolve the circularity of defining plasticity through realized change, this work formalizes plasticity as a prospective property defined as the inverse of a state's configurational constraint within a declared representation. The theoretical framework proves that increasing plasticity strictly lowers all positive finite structural barriers to alternative states, guaranteeing monotonically expanding, nested accessible repertoires where aggregate coupling serves as the operational constraint in network architectures. This decouples adaptive capacity from observed displacement, establishing a rigorous metric to quantify a system's latent potential to adapt before any transition occurs.
Observing large parameter shifts does not mean a network is plastic—true adaptive capacity is prospective, defined here as the inverse of structural constraints preventing displacement to alternative states.
Plasticity is invoked across the sciences to explain how systems can change, yet it is inferred from the very change it is meant to explain. A system may have many alternatives, realize none and still be plastic. Another may be driven far toward its only alternative, but the magnitude of that change does not establish its plasticity. What matters for plasticity is not how far the system moves but how strongly its present configuration constrains alternatives. Here I propose that plasticity, understood as a prospective property, is inverse configurational constraint: a system is plastic to the extent that its present configuration weakly constrains displacement toward alternatives within a declared representation. For systems sharing a functional partition, structural representation, and normalized architecture, increasing plasticity lowers every positive finite structural barrier separating the current state from its alternatives. With a fixed accessibility criterion, the accessible repertoire can expand but cannot shrink. In network representations, aggregate coupling is identified as configurational constraint, whose inverse defines plasticity. Barrier reduction and repertoire nesting are consequences, not components, of the definition. This connects two research traditions: quantifying connectivity without interpreting it as plasticity, and treating plasticity as a capacity for change without a prospective operational measure.