Bounded Judgment: A Conceptual Course Through the Identity-Persistence Program

Bounded Judgment is a thirteen-lecture conceptual course through the Identity-Persistence Program, a formal research program on the structural preconditions of coherent judgment by bounded observers. Its generative question is: what licenses sameness through change? The course develops a dependency architecture in which a sufficiently declared regime fixes the distinctions relevant to a judgment; those distinctions induce identity conditions and quotient structure; identity makes admissible transformation and persistence meaningful; and only then do observables, evidence, probability, consequence, and verification acquire determinate roles. Where a demanded judgment does not factor through the available resolution, the framework separates the exact obstruction, minimal informational repair, realizability question, authorization boundary, and any declaration required to proceed. The central philosophical discipline is non-promotion. State is not object-as-judged; representation is not identity; evidence accumulation is not unique identification; mathematical sufficiency is not realization; realization is not authorization; declaration is not derivation; and verification under a declared regime is not final ontology. A bounded evaluator may produce judgments that another bounded evaluator can verify exactly, up to the capacity of the declared channels, without certifying its regime as reality’s final constitution. This position asserts neither realism nor anti-realism about what reality is “in itself”; application never required deciding that question. The standard is uniform across applied theories. Every application operates through indexed questions, distinctions, access conditions, inference rules, and resolution, whether fully declared or partly tacit. Making that index explicit neither uniquely demotes this program nor grants competing theories ontological privilege. Nor does equal treatment imply relativism: applications may differ substantially in empirical reach, predictive accuracy, robustness, resolution, reproducibility, and practical success. Worked finite examples develop equivalence, quotienting, admissible transformation, evidence collapse, factorization, minimal repair, declaration, verification, and lawful retirement. The course introduces no new theorem ownership; it provides a pedagogical and operational map of results proved elsewhere in the Identity-Persistence corpus while preserving their exact scopes and claim types.