Auditing Metaphysical Repair: Burden Provenance, Repair Warrant, and Scoped Closure

Metaphysical arguments are frequently repaired rather than abandoned. A defender adds a principle, distinction, modal source, exclusion condition, or explanatory relation to answer an objection. A further difficulty may then become salient, and the repair is often blamed for generating it. This paper argues that temporal order does not determine justificatory attribution. The proposed audit is deliberately non-algorithmic and ordered. It first asks an entitlement question: can local repair success be granted while the later difficulty remains unresolved? If not, the issue is repair warrant, and before/after provenance comparison is premature. If local success can be held fixed, the audit asks where the remaining difficulty comes from. It may be pre-existing, repair-induced, or attributable to a changed frame; residual and exposed burdens are two forms of the first. Same-frame post-gate burdens are then evaluated as unresolved requirements or theoretical costs, whereas a frame-induced burden initiates a new audit under the successor frame. This gate-plus-two-axis structure replaces a flat taxonomy that mixed provenance with evaluative role. A controlled grounding-style witness shows that repair-induced regression is non-empty without assigning it a special evaluative status. Cases from grounding necessitarianism, Revelation and grounding physicalism, non-branching personal persistence, and laws of nature illustrate the method. The proposal is a structured interpretive audit, not a decision procedure or a new logic of theory revision. Its narrower aim is to prevent repair entitlement, temporal sequence, revision effects, and evaluative significance from being conflated.