Explanatory Bedrock and Evaluative Foundation: Why Experiential Empiricism's Admitted Limits Contain What Externalism's Hidden Axioms Lack

Every epistemological framework eventually hits explanatory bedrock: primitives that cannot be explained by more fundamental principles. Externalism and Experiential Empiricism both reach such limits, but they differ radically in what those limits contain. This paper demonstrates that while both frameworks must accept unexplained primitives, only Experiential Empiricism's bedrock (valenced experience) simultaneously provides the evaluative foundation necessary for ethics and deterministic policy prescriptions. Externalist frameworks (materialism, theism, Platonism) hit bedrock at unexplained coordination mechanisms, initial conditions, or abstract structures that provide no basis for evaluation. The result is an asymmetry: both have mysteries, but only EE's mystery is also the answer to "what matters?" This asymmetry, combined with EE's epistemic parsimony and the demonstrable performative contradiction in externalist positions, shows that framework choice is not aesthetic preference but recognition of logical necessity. The paper concludes by showing how this evaluative foundation deterministically generates the Hedonic Core Framework: a complete ethical system that eliminates suffering spikes while preserving diversity as detection mechanism and enabling flourishing, avoiding the extinction implications of simple negative utilitarianism.