The Boundary Discipline: Where the Lens Starts, Stops, and Applies to Itself

The scope conditions of the Identity–Persistence Program are established across several formal and architectural papers but do not by themselves provide an operating procedure for routing particular claims. This paper supplies that procedure without introducing new mathematics. The procedure asks whether a declared regime covers a claim and whether admissible evidence reaches it. Depending on those answers, the claim receives a licensed verdict, UNDEFINED, or a classified non-verdict. Verdict grammar without a declared license is prohibited. Fourteen runs apply this method to questions concerning the framework’s domain neutrality, uniqueness, universal applicability, self-grounding, ontology, experience, wagers, substrate hypotheses, and its own summary claims. The analysis distinguishes theorem-backed consequences inside declared regimes from the adopted methodological rule of withholding verdicts outside them. The framework is thereby shown to be operationally self-applying but foundationally conditional: it can route its own scope claims and identify the primitive it cannot internally discharge without claiming to ground itself, solve ontology, or establish maximality across paradigms. The paper presents the Boundary Discipline as a methodology for bounded inquiry: declare before evaluating, issue no claim above its evidence, and classify rather than manufacture certainty where the operative regime or evidence boundary does not reach.