When a Boundary Claim Becomes Testable: A Criterion for Adjudicating Scale-Relative Claims, with One Coded Case

Abstract

Claims that a self-maintaining or cognitive system extends to some scale are chronically underdetermined: in the cases usually discussed the investigator draws the boundary, and can redraw it around whatever is interesting. The standing defence of realism about such boundaries concedes that boundary-drawing is interpretative and answers that interpretation is ubiquitous in science. That reply holds only while its unstated subject holds: the interpreter is the theorist. This paper specifies the domains in which that subject fails. A domain admits adjudication when its perimeter is fixed by a party indifferent to the hypothesis under test, is observable to someone who did not draw it, and moves only by dated recorded events. Within such a domain the measurable quantity inverts: not whether a boundary is drawn correctly, but what a hypothesis-independent perimeter fails to contain. Its principal yield is negative, excluding most domains in which the dispute is conducted, relative to hypotheses for which the investigator sets the perimeter. One acquisition, coded from two disjoint document sets, serves as an existence proof: an audited perimeter of 60 legal entities contains no upstream project, while .956 of the product’s source composition originates outside it. The firm is an instrument, not a subject. Includes zharnikov-2026bo-boundary-claim-testable.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper’s claims, assumptions, and dependencies. The paper’s full machine-first bundle (the SPINE claim/dependency graph and the ONTOLOGY term module) lives in the public repository; see https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard. This PDF is generated programmatically from that machine-first source under a research-as-repository model.