Interpretation, Learning, and Empathy as One Constraint: A Residual-Adequacy Architecture with Accountable Abstention

An agent must act on the situation before it, learn what it cannot yet represent, and model other agents well enough to coordinate. These faculties are usually realized by separate mechanisms, yet they share a failure mode: the situation can exceed what the agent can currently represent, and the honest response is then a principled refusal that says what was missing. We develop a small cognitive architecture in which these limits arise from a single quantity. An Interpretation-Decision Unit (IDU) interprets a content vector through a family of regimes, local representational frames with private bases, and decides which actions the interpretation licenses. A scalar residual of the content against the active regimes' representational scope drives the unit. Low residual with a clean licensing emits an action. Otherwise, the unit re-interprets, attempts a description-length-justified expansion of its representation, or halts with a typed, witnessed terminal. We prove the unit is total and deterministic: for any content and fixed configuration, it halts in finitely many bounded-cost steps with a unique terminal witness, so abstention carries its cause by construction. We then show, by binding the architecture's open parameters without changing its mechanics, that the same residual-against-scope constraint recovers three independently documented phenomena at three scopes: the typology of not-knowing (typed abstention), a misunderstanding between agents that is forced, localized to one shared concept, and structurally invisible to the agent committing it (bounded empathy), and prerequisite dependence in learning derived from a bounded focus window rather than posited (developmental prerequisites). Each instantiation is worked for both a natural and an artificial agent and states a falsifiable prediction, showing that the same constraint can model limits in both human and machine cognition. The account contributes a unification: three faculties as one constraint, and a notion of accountable abstention that is typed and witnessed by construction.