Resolution Theory: A Unified Theory of Thresholds

This paper presents Resolution Theory as a unified theory of thresholds. Its central schema is simple: buildup is not landing. Causes are not resolution. Explanation, complexity, evidence, pressure, and formal structure may accumulate, but they do not become authorship, consciousness, knowledge, validity, or ethical standing by accumulation alone. A threshold must be crossed. The paper grounds this structure in the Exposed Cogito, moving from the first certainty of the thinking subject to not I, boundary, exposure, correction, and shared life. From this root, Resolution Theory develops accounts of ontology, epistemology, consciousness, personal identity, free will, normativity, ethics, meaning, logic, scepticism, and solipsism. The paper argues that many persistent philosophical disputes arise from confusing buildup with landing, explanation with erasure, or formal intelligibility with standing. It reframes free will as resolution under exposure, consciousness as bounded interiority, knowledge as exposure tested tracking, ethics as the minimum structure of authored life, and paradox as a diagnostic tool for discovering the rules of logic. The result is a candidate unified system in which reality, agency, knowledge, meaning, and moral life become answerable through threshold, resolution, and exposure.