The Non-Individuating Structure of Attention: A Framework for Interpretation under Underdetermination

This paper develops a formal framework—the GSS-Attention Framework—to analyse the role of attention in conditions of structural underdetermination. The central claim is that attention does not function as a selection mechanism over interpretive possibilities, but rather as a distribution over a space of competing trajectories. Given background conditions and input structures, attention assigns weights to multiple admissible interpretations without uniquely individuating any single trajectory. Building on this, the paper argues for a general form of rule underdetermination: for any admissible constraint structure, multiple trajectories remain compatible with the available evidence. Integrating a Lewis-style elimination framework and a Dickie-style anti-luck condition, it is shown that neither evidential elimination nor anti-luck constraints suffice to secure uniqueness at the level of knowledge-supporting trajectories. This leads to a global non-individuation result: if elimination fails across all admissible frameworks, then no higher-order constraint structure can uniquely determine a privileged interpretation. The framework is extended to a hierarchical model of attention operating across three levels—trajectories, frameworks, and constraint structures—each of which fails to admit a unique maximiser. Through a recursive transformation operator over frameworks, the system exhibits no stable fixed point, thereby undermining the possibility of a globally determinate semantic structure. The paper concludes that indeterminacy is not merely epistemic or representational, but structural: no level of the interpretive system yields a uniquely determined outcome. This has significant implications for theories of vagueness, particularly those relying on stable rule selection, determinate boundaries, or convergent semantic frameworks.