The Relatum Problem in Persistence: Why Identity Criteria Cannot Determine Their Own Domain

Metaphysical debates over diachronic identity are standardly structured around competing continuity criteria, systematically bracketing whether candidate bearers of identity are structurally authorized prior to evaluation. This paper argues that this oversight is not merely a benign pragmatic presupposition of inquiry, but a structural defect that systematically misconfigures past and present persistence debates. We establish the Relatum Authorization Necessity Thesis, demonstrating that persistence criteria presuppose relatum availability rather than generating their domains of application (V →C). To diagnose and correct this misconfiguration, we formulate the Diachronic Relatum Eligibility Framework (DREF). Rather than supplying a universal inventory of admissibility conditions or a new first-order theory, DREF constrains the order of justification by formalizing the dependency relation between admissibility conditions and relatum discrimination. By integrating framework-relative admissibility inventories via the Domain Eligibility Condition (DEC) where AT functions as a placeholder for explanatory constraints, adopting the Domain-Typed Applicability Lemma, and deploying personal identity variable disagreement (xorg vs. xpers) as our core diagnostic case study, this paper establishes a rigorous meta-theoretic requirement for diachronic metaphysics: before applying persistence criteria, establish the justificatory conditions under which a persistence question is well-formed.