The Scope of Situated Judgment - An Ontology of the Judged Subject in a Generative Relational Framework

Abstract

Judgments of persons are routinely formed inside one relation and used inside
another. A supervisor’s account of a researcher is read by an admissions
committee; a clinician’s formulation follows a patient into a different service;
an electorate that has never met a candidate decides on the strength of
endorsements by those who claim to know him. This paper asks what such a
judgment warrants once it leaves the relation in which it was formed. On the
framework used here, what a relation generates is generated within it and is
available only from the positions its parties occupied, so an attribute
exhibited in one relation is not thereby a property carried into others. The
paper distinguishes two claims about assessment that are usually run together:
that a judgment is a noisy estimate of a real underlying quality, for which the
remedies are structure and de-biasing, and that there is no such quality to
estimate, for which those remedies are misdirected. It argues that both hold,
in different domains, and states where the boundary falls. A limiting case is
then examined in which a referee signs an account written by its subject: no
shared experience exists and the instrument functions regardless, which
indicates that such instruments do not carry an account of a relation at all.
What they transmit is a field of relational conditions that reconfigures what
the person can subsequently generate; the account is the justification offered
for opening that field rather than the thing conveyed. This explains why an
empty instrument works, why such instruments are exchanged for things other
than accounts, and why the same property that lets an unassessable person enter
a system is what makes the instrument tradeable. Two cases are compared,
political selection and academic recommendation, and the comparison is drawn
not through the motives of those who judge but through the regime under which
judgments are issued: who may issue one, at what weight, with what
observational access, with what transferability, and under what provision for
revision. The paper’s positive proposal follows from the political case.
Political theory did not resolve the problem of judging a candidate by making
judgment more accurate; it made the mandate revisable. That remedy is
institutional and temporal rather than epistemic, and it generalises. Where the
paper’s claims are already made by professional assessment standards, by the
conferralist account of social properties, or by the selection model of
representation, they are conceded rather than asserted.

Keywords: situated judgment; validity; social ontology;

Discussion Paper Note

This paper is a preliminary discussion paper intended to share an evolving idea
and invite further dialogue, criticism, revision, and independent development.
Its definitions, distinctions, and constructions remain provisional.
Circulation across scholarly and practical communities is part of the purpose
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The author treats the viewpoints, concepts, and lines of reasoning presented
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may have appeared in other intellectual, cultural, and disciplinary traditions.
The manuscript therefore states its known antecedents, separates the
researcher-origin proposal from later formal reconstruction, and leaves
historical priority open pending a systematic originality review.

The arguments should be understood as provisional and historically situated.
Readers are encouraged to question, test, revise, extend, reinterpret, or
independently develop the ideas presented here. Where appropriate,
acknowledgment of this paper as one point of encounter in the development of a
related idea is appreciated. Such acknowledgment records an intellectual route;
the ideas themselves remain available for criticism, revision, and independent
development.

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The author encourages good-faith discussion, criticism, independent inquiry,
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applying the arguments made here. This paper argues that judgments of persons
warrant less than they are ordinarily taken to warrant. An argument of that
shape can be used to dismiss any judgment whatever, including judgments that
are well founded and that protect people from harm, and the paper accordingly
states the conditions under which a judgment retains its force rather than
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This page consolidates the manuscript’s publication status, licence,
development disclosure, research-programme relation, declared interest, and
suggested citation.

Publication status of this draft.
This working draft records an evolving stage of the author’s position and is
circulated for discussion. Definitions, section structure, statements, and
numbering remain subject to revision. Several literatures the argument bears on
are represented only in part, as the accompanying literature audit records.
Empirical work on the claims advanced here, specialist review of the
political-theory and measurement material, and a systematic originality audit
remain future research stages.

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Except where otherwise indicated, copyright 2026 Wanhong Huang. This work is
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Statement on the use of language models.
The exploratory discussions and preparation of this paper involved Anthropic’s
Claude. The model supported exploratory dialogue, source discovery followed by
verification against publisher, journal, governmental, and institutional pages,
argumentative criticism, and drafting in . Every source cited here was
verified before it was written into the manuscript rather than after. The
author selected the research question, directed and approved the theoretical
commitments and the epistemic status of the claims, and bears sole
responsibility for the manuscript, including its definitions, constructions,
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Declared interest.
The author is subject to procedures of the kind examined in
Section 14 and has an interest in the conclusions reached
about them. The paper is written as a general analysis of judgments of persons,
of which academic recommendation is one case among several, no individual
process or institution is described, and the arguments are assessed against
criteria stated in advance. The interest is declared because a paper arguing
that a class of judgments warrants less than it is taken to warrant should say
where its author stands with respect to that class.

Related research programme.
This paper is project P004 and the fourth in a series on trust, neutrality, and
the transmission of shared experience. Project P001 takes responsibility for
the account of neutrality as the governance of a field of relational
conditions; P002 for the individual-scale credibility problem and the
commitment trilemma; P003 for the procedure of reference-based selection and
for the reading of multiple reference as reconstruction. The present paper
takes responsibility for the ontology of the judged subject, for the account of
what such judgments transmit, for the comparison of issuance regimes, and for
the scope conditions proposed. Later papers take the duties of the party who
issues a judgment, the distribution of the conditions under which judgments are
generated, and the authority to interpret a shared experience; those questions
are marked where they arise and are not argued here.

Suggested citation.
Huang, Wanhong. “The Scope of Situated Judgment: An Ontology of the Judged
Subject in a Generative Relational Framework.” Working discussion paper, 2026.

1. Introduction

An electorate decides among candidates it has never met. Its members have read
about them, watched them speak, and heard from people who claim to know them.
Almost nobody voting has stood in any relation to the person voted for, and the
decision is made anyway, at enormous stakes, and has been made this way for as
long as there have been elections.

The situation recurs far beyond politics. An admissions committee decides on a
candidate it will meet for twenty minutes, on the strength of accounts written
by people who worked with the candidate for years. A clinician’s formulation
follows a patient into a service that did not produce it. A performance rating
made by one manager governs a promotion decided by another. In each case a
judgment of a person is formed inside one relation and then used inside a
different one, by parties who did not stand in the first.

This paper asks what such a judgment warrants once it has left the relation in
which it was formed.

The question is old, and the paper claims no novelty in asking it. It is one of
the oldest questions in political theory, where the problem of how an electorate
can judge a candidate it cannot know has been argued since antiquity, and where
the received answers include filtration through better-placed intermediaries,
the deliberate selection of persons of distinction, and the substitution of
competitive selection for direct assessment. The paper concedes that tradition
in Section 6.1 before advancing anything of its own.

What the paper adds is narrower. The tradition asks who should judge, on what
grounds, and how often the judgment should be renewed. It does not ask what the
judgment is a judgment of. This paper takes that question, and takes it
under a specific commitment: that what a relation generates is generated within
it, and is available only from the positions its parties occupied. On that
commitment, an attribute exhibited in one relation is not thereby a property
that the person carries into others, and a judgment formed in a relation is a
judgment about what that relation produced rather than about a quality residing
in the person judged.

Three consequences organise the paper.

The first concerns what is wrong with such judgments when they go wrong.
Section 10 distinguishes two claims that are usually run
together. On the first, a judgment is a noisy or biased estimate of a real
underlying quality, and the remedies are structure, calibration, and the
removal of bias. On the second, there is no such quality to estimate, and those
remedies produce a more reliable estimate of nothing. The paper holds that both
claims are true in different domains, and its contribution here is to say where
the boundary falls rather than to assert the second everywhere. The strongest
opposing position, that validities generalise across settings and that apparent
situational specificity is an artifact of sampling error, is stated at length in
Section 6.4 and answered in
Section 10.3.

The second concerns what such judgments transmit, and here the paper’s answer
departs from what is usually assumed. Consider a case that is neither rare nor
scandalous: a referee tells a candidate to draft the account and undertakes to
sign it, or asks for a curriculum vitae and writes from that. No shared
experience is being reported, and the instrument works exactly as it would
otherwise. Section 9 takes this as decisive. What such an
instrument transmits is not an account of a relation but a field of relational
conditions: it alters the set of relations available to the person in the
receiving system, and what the person subsequently generates is produced in
that new configuration. The account of the relation is the justification
offered for opening the field, not the thing conveyed. Three features of
practice follow from this and are otherwise puzzling: that an empty instrument
functions; that such instruments are exchanged for things which are not
accounts, including undertakings of future cooperation; and that the property
which allows a person no institution can assess to enter one is the same
property that makes the instrument tradeable. The good and the bad here are one
property and not two.

The third concerns what follows for practice, and the paper’s proposal is borrowed. Two cases are examined. In political selection, judgment is issued by
many parties with weak but public observational access, and the judgment is
revisable on a fixed schedule. In academic recommendation, judgment is issued
by few parties with private access that may in the limiting case be empty, and
it is not revisable at all. The comparison in
Section 15 is drawn through the regime under which judgments
are issued rather than through the motives of those who issue them, since votes
are cast for patronage and inheritance as much as for programmes, and motive
purity distinguishes nothing.

What that comparison shows is that political theory solved its version of this
problem without solving the epistemic problem at all. It did not make the
electorate better at judging. It made the mandate expire. Fixed terms, periodic
re-election, and removal are institutional and temporal devices, and they
render a judgment that was never reliable tolerable by ensuring it does not
stand indefinitely. Section 17 proposes that this is
generalisable, and that judgments of persons in other domains lack it.

Where the paper’s claims have prior owners, they are conceded at the point they
arise. Professional assessment standards already locate validity in the
interpretation of a result for a specified use rather than in the instrument,
which anticipates the scope argument of Section 11. The
conferralist account of social properties already holds that such properties
are conferred in context rather than possessed, which anticipates much of
Section 8. The selection model of political representation
already reframes electoral choice as the identification of a type rather than
the measurement of a quality, which anticipates part of
Section 13. And the account of interactive kinds already
holds that classifications change the people classified, which anticipates
Section 16. The paper’s contribution lies in what remains after
these concessions, and Section 6.8 states what that is.

One further caution belongs at the outset. Several literatures that a paper of
this kind might lean on report effects that are small, conditional, or
unreplicated. Teacher-expectancy effects are on the best synthesis typically
small and more likely to dissipate than to accumulate; stereotype-threat
findings have a contested replication record; and labelling theory was itself
modified by its principal proponents in response to weak evidence for its
strongest form. Section 16 accordingly rests on the mechanism
those literatures do support, which is the alteration of the opportunities
available to a person, rather than on the mechanism they do not, which is the
alteration of the person.

Section 5 supplies the practice and the vocabulary.
Section 6 locates the account.
Section 7 states the method and the conditions of
disconfirmation. Section 8 develops the ontology and
Section 9 the account of transmission.
Section 10 distinguishes the two claims about assessment,
Section 11 states the scope condition, and
Section 12 examines the professional rules that already
apply one. Section 13 and
Section 14 present the two cases and
Section 15 compares them.
Section 16 treats the fixation of an interpretation and its
return upon the person, Section 17 states what may be
claimed of a person, Section 18 states what the analysis returns to
the wider framework, Section 19 records the limits, and
Section 20 consolidates the position.

2. Background and Preliminaries

This section describes the practices the paper examines, states the vocabulary
in which professional assessment already discusses the scope of a judgment, and
defines the terms carried from the preceding papers. Analysis is reserved for
Section 8 onward.

2.1 Judgments of Persons in Political and Institutional Selection

The practices at issue share a structure and differ in almost everything else.
The structure is this: a judgment of a person is formed by a party standing in
some relation to them, and is then used by a party standing in no such
relation, to decide something that affects the person judged.

Political selection.
An electorate chooses among candidates. Almost no voter has stood in any
working relation to the person voted for. What is available is public
performance, reported record, and the endorsement of parties, colleagues, and
associations that claim closer acquaintance. The decision is consequential, it
is taken at scale, and the arrangement is very old.

Academic and professional recommendation.
A committee selects among candidates on the strength of accounts written by
those who worked with them. The accounts are ordinarily confidential to the
candidate, free in form, and written by parties the candidate nominated. The
committee has no independent access to what the accounts report. This case was
examined as a procedure in the preceding paper in this series; here it is one
of two cases and is examined for what the judgment warrants rather than for how
the procedure is run.

Clinical formulation and its transfer between services.
A clinician forms an account of a patient in the course of a therapeutic
relation and records it. The record follows the patient into services that did
not produce it and whose relation to the patient differs. Professional
standards treat the resulting transfer as requiring care, and
Section 12 examines those standards as the paper’s
principal precedent.

Performance appraisal and risk assessment.
A rating made by one manager governs decisions taken by another; a risk
instrument scored in one setting informs a decision in a second. Both are
instances of the same structure, and both are treated here through the
professional standards that govern them rather than as separate cases.

Two features common to all four are recorded because the argument uses them.
The judging party in the second stage cannot inspect what the first-stage party
observed, and has access only to the account. And the person judged ordinarily stands outside the second stage altogether.

2.2 Validity Vocabulary in Professional Assessment Standards

The professions that assess persons formally have developed a vocabulary for
exactly the question this paper asks, and it is set out here so that
Section 11 can concede it before extending it.

The governing statement holds that validity is the degree to which evidence and
theory support the interpretations of test scores for proposed uses, and that
validation is the accumulation of evidence supporting those proposed score
interpretations (Association & Association, 2014). Two consequences of that formulation matter
here. Validity attaches to an interpretation for a use rather than to an instrument, so that validity is a property a test holds only under a specified interpretation. And a validation
argument is therefore bounded by the use it was constructed for, so that
employing a result for a purpose outside that use is not a lesser degree of the
same warrant but a different question, on which the accumulated evidence is
silent.

The unified conception behind that formulation treats validity as a single
judgment supported by several kinds of evidence, and includes the social
consequences of test use within the validation argument rather than outside it
(Messick, 1989; Messick, 1995). The paper uses this in
Section 16, where the consequences of a fixed interpretation
for the person interpreted are treated as bearing on the interpretation’s
warrant rather than as a separate ethical matter.

The vocabulary is a professional consensus about instruments with scores. What
this paper takes from it is the form of the claim rather than its domain: that
a judgment carries warrant for a specified use and not beyond it.
Section 11.2 states what has to be added when the judgment
is not a score and the specification is not a use but a relation.

2.3 Vocabulary Carried from the Preceding Papers

The account uses a small vocabulary established across this series, restated
here at the length the argument requires.

A relation is an ongoing process between parties rather than a state
obtaining at a moment, and is described by what it produces.

The generativity of a relation is its capacity to continue producing
such outcomes, including outcomes no party can specify in advance. Generativity
is a property of the relation and not of either party.

A relational condition is an arrangement whose presence or absence
changes which relations can be formed or continued, without determining which
of them are. The field of a set of parties is the set of arrangements
consistent with the conditions then in place. These two terms are the
preceding papers’ central objects and they carry the weight of
Section 9.

Co-experience is what a relation generates between its parties: the
undertakings, difficulties, judgments and understandings that arose in it and
belong to neither party alone. A relational position is the standpoint
from which a party stands in a relation, which fixes what of the relation is
available to that party.

Revisability is the requirement that an interpretation remain open to
being reopened, and that no interpretation be placed beyond the reach of
further interpretation. Section 13 finds this requirement
already institutionalised in one of the two cases examined.

Two terms are introduced by this paper. A situated judgment is a
judgment of a person formed within a relation, on the basis of what that
relation made available from the position the judging party occupied. And the
issuance regime of a domain is the set of arrangements governing who may
issue such a judgment, at what weight, with what observational access, with
what transferability, and under what provision for revision.
Section 15 compares the two cases along exactly these five
dimensions.

The framework within which the paper works may be stated in one sentence: it is
a theory of how subject, meaning, value, creation, and normativity co-emerge
through generative relational processes. Section 8 develops the
part of it the argument requires and imports no more.

3. Literature Review

This section locates the account among the literatures it depends on. It opens
with the tradition that has argued the paper’s question longest and concedes
it, then turns to the ontology of social properties, the evidence on whether
attributes travel across settings, and the position that most directly opposes
the paper’s ontology.

3.1 Judgment of Candidates in Political Theory

The problem of how a body that lacks acquaintance with a person can nonetheless
judge them is the constitutive problem of representative government, and it has
been argued for as long as representative institutions have existed. The paper
concedes that tradition before advancing anything.

The form of the concession should be stated exactly, since the paper’s claim to
have added something depends on it. This subsection engages three treatments: a historical account of how
representative institutions were established and what the choice of election
produced (Manin, 1997); a conceptual analysis of what representation
consists in (Pitkin, 1967); and a contemporary account of what an electorate
is doing when it chooses (Mansbridge, 2009). Two primary statements of
positions the paper relies on are cited directly, and the remainder of the
tradition is cited through these treatments, which makes this subsection a
positioning of the paper’s question within the tradition rather than a survey
of it. Section 19.3 records the consequence.

Election as a device of distinction rather than of resemblance.
The most developed historical treatment holds that representative government
should be understood as a combination of democratic and undemocratic,
aristocratic elements, and that when representative institutions were first
established in Europe and America they were designed in opposition to democracy
proper (Manin, 1997). The argument proceeds by recovering the alternatives
that were available and forsaken, from classical Athens to Renaissance
Florence, where selection by lot was in use; and it brings out what the choice
of election produced, including the elitist aspect of elections and the
non-binding character of campaign promises (Manin, 1997). The relevant result for this paper is that election operates as a device of distinction rather than as a neutral instrument for identifying the competent. It systematically selects those whom an electorate
perceives as distinguished, which is a property of the selection device rather
than of the persons selected.

Representation as several distinct relations.
The standard conceptual treatment distinguishes formalistic, descriptive,
symbolic and substantive senses of representation, and holds that no one of
them exhausts the concept (Pitkin, 1967). Two features of that treatment
bear on the present argument. It establishes that what an electorate is
choosing is underdetermined by the act of choosing, since the same election can
be read as authorising, as resembling, as standing for, or as acting for. And
its governing image is one this paper’s framework would recognise: the concept
is compared to a complicated three-dimensional structure in a dark enclosure,
of which theorists supply photographs taken from different angles
()[p. 10]pitkin1967. The image is offered there about a concept rather
than about a person, and the resemblance to the account of standpoints
developed in Section 8.1 is noted without being claimed
as continuity.

Selection of a type rather than measurement of a quality.
The distinction that treatment develops has a canonical earlier statement. A
programme examining whether the mechanisms of accountability characteristic of
democracies suffice to induce representatives to act in the interest of the
represented separates two conceptions of what elections do: on the mandate
conception voters choose a programme and the election authorises its pursuit,
and on the accountability conception elections hold governments responsible for
the results of past action, so that governments anticipating the voters’
judgment choose accordingly (Manin & Przeworski, 1999; Przeworski & Stokes, 1999). The same volume
poses the alternative in the terms the present paper needs, distinguishing the
selection of good types from the sanctioning of poor performance
(Fearon, 1999).

The contemporary treatment nearest to this paper’s concern reframes what an
electorate is doing. Where a representative has self-motivated reasons for
acting as the represented would wish, it is more efficient to invest resources
in advance in selecting the required type than to invest afterwards in
monitoring and sanction (Mansbridge, 2009). Accountability on that model
takes narrative and deliberative forms rather than the form of reward and
punishment. The same author’s earlier survey distinguishes promissory,
anticipatory, gyroscopic and surrogate forms of representation
(Mansbridge, 2003).

This substantially anticipates part of what
Section 13 says about the political case, and the
concession is made here. The selection model already holds that electoral
choice is the identification of a kind of person rather than the measurement of
a quality. What the present paper adds is a question the model does not ask:
what a judgment that someone is of the required type is a judgment of,
given that the evidence for it was generated in relations the electorate did
not participate in.

Collective judgment by parties individually poorly placed.
Whether many weakly informed judges can collectively judge well is disputed and
has been since antiquity. The classical passage at Politics III.11 has
been read as an argument that the many, taken together, may judge better than
the few (Waldron, 1995), and as an epistemic argument about the aggregation
of dispersed information (Ober, 2013); it has also been read as making a
claim about the virtue of the multitude rather than about its collective
epistemic quality (Cammack, 2013). This paper takes no position in that
dispute and records it because
Section 15 relies on a contrast between many weak observers
and few strong claimants, and a reader should know that the favourable reading
of the first term is contested.

What voters can use in place of direct knowledge.
Empirical work establishes that voters substitute cues for knowledge, and that
this sometimes works. Poorly informed voters who correctly perceive the
endorsements attached to a measure can emulate the voting behaviour of the well
informed (Lupia, 1994), and the general account of low-information
rationality holds that voters reason with shortcuts drawn from daily life
rather than from encyclopaedic knowledge (Popkin, 1991). The finding is
double-edged and the countervailing work states why: heuristics can also
mislead, and their advantages are unevenly distributed across levels of
political sophistication (Lau, 2001).

Endorsement is therefore the political case’s version of this paper’s object.
A party claiming relational access to a candidate issues a judgment, and an
electorate lacking such access uses it. Section 13 takes
that as the structure to be analysed.

3.2 Conferral of Social Properties and the Production of Subjects

The ontology this paper uses has prior owners in social ontology and in the
history of the subject, and they are conceded here rather than in a closing
note.

Status conferred rather than possessed.
The account nearest to the paper’s position holds that a range of social
properties are conferred: a status is imposed by others adopting an attitude
toward a person, ordinarily on the basis of some further property, and the
person need not in fact possess that further property but need only be taken to
possess it (‘Asta, 2018). Statuses so conferred consist in constraints and
enablements, are sensitive to context, and are revocable. This anticipates a
great deal of Section 8, including the claim that a judgment
may function without a corresponding quality in the person judged, and it is
conceded as such. A critical response develops the difficulties the account
faces in handling intersecting categories (Jenkins, 2019).

The wider apparatus is older. Social facts of this kind rest on the collective assignment of functions that exceed what the physical properties of objects and persons alone would support, under the general form in which something
counts as something else in a context (Searle, 1995). What the present paper
adds to that apparatus is developed in
Section 8.2 and stated as an addition rather than a
discovery.

Production of the subject by the structure that judges it.
The claim that a subject is produced through relations of power and knowledge
rather than pre-existing them belongs to a body of work whose stated project
was a history of the modes by which human beings are made subjects
(Foucault, 1982). On that account power operates by structuring the field of
possible actions of others, which is close enough to the present paper’s
vocabulary that the debt must be stated plainly.
Section 8.2 asks a question in that lineage and claims
no independence from it.

A more recent analytic treatment supplies the distinction the paper needs to
state its own question precisely: between what makes a social fact obtain in a
particular case and what sets up the frame principles under which facts of that
kind are possible at all (Epstein, 2015). The paper’s second-order question
concerns the second.

Priority of relations over the parties related.
Relational sociology holds that the social world consists in unfolding
relations rather than in entities that subsequently enter them, and that the
terms of a relation derive their meaning from it (Emirbayer, 1997); parallel
programmes develop the same commitment
(Donati, 2011; Crossley, 2011). The philosophical statement that individuation
precedes the individual, so that the individual is a provisional result of a
process rather than its starting point, belongs to the same family
(Simondon, 2020).

One terminological collision requires statement. A constructionist account of
selfhood published under a title one word from the name of the framework used
here treats the self as constituted in and through relationship
(Gergen, 2009). The objects differ: that account theorises selfhood, and the
framework used here concerns the conditions under which relations continue to
be generated. The resemblance of terms is stated so that a reader reads it as coincidence rather than as derivation.

3.3 Cross-Situational Consistency of Behaviour

The paper’s ontology entails that an attribute exhibited in one relation need
not be exhibited in another. Whether that is true is an empirical question with
a long and now largely settled literature, and the settlement is less
favourable to the paper than the paper’s ontology alone would suggest.

The situationist challenge held that correlations between measured traits and
observed behaviour rarely exceed a low ceiling when behaviour is sampled
independently of the questionnaire (Mischel, 1968). The response held that correlations of that size are substantial, that predictions from situations are no larger, and that aggregation across occasions recovers substantial
consistency (Kenrick, 1988). The synthesis now generally accepted
holds that behaviour reflects person, situation, and a large person-by-situation
interaction (Fleeson, 2009).

Two contemporary formulations matter here and they pull in different
directions.

The first supports the paper. Personality is expressed as stable patterns of
situational variability, so that what is consistent about a person is a profile
of if-then contingencies rather than a level of a trait
(Mischel, 1995). On that account an attribute is exhibited in a
relation because that relation supplies the conditions under which it is
exhibited, which is the paper’s claim in psychological vocabulary.

The second cuts against it. Experience-sampling work finds that within-person
variability across situations is very large, so that a person manifests nearly
all levels of a trait in the course of ordinary life, and yet the central
tendencies of these within-person distributions are almost perfectly stable
(Fleeson, 2001). On that account the person carries a stable distribution
across relations, which is a property of the person and not of any relation.
The paper accepts the finding and states in Section 10.3 what it takes to follow from it.

A further result bears on the paper’s scope condition rather than on its
ontology. The accuracy of a judgment of a person depends on whether the
relevant cues were available, detected, and used, so that accuracy is a
function of the judge’s access as well as of the judge’s skill
(Funder, 1995). Section 15.2 makes observational
access one of the five dimensions along which the two cases are compared.

3.4 Generalization of Validity across Settings

The position that most directly opposes the paper’s ontology is set out here at
length, because a reader who accepts it will reject
Section 10 and should be able to see exactly where the
disagreement lies.

The programme holds that the observed variation in validity coefficients across
settings is largely an artifact of sampling error, unreliability in the
measures, and range restriction in the samples, rather than evidence that
validity genuinely differs by setting (Schmidt, 1977). Refinements of
the method concluded that after these artifacts are corrected the residual
variability is close to zero, which was taken as further evidence against the
hypothesis that validity is situationally specific (Schmidt et al., 1993). The
synthesis of the programme reported general mental ability as the most valid
single predictor across jobs, with an operational validity of approximately
.51 overall, higher for complex work and lower for simple work
(Schmidt, 1998).

If that programme is correct in the strong form, then attributes measured in
one setting do predict performance in others, the apparent situation-dependence
of behaviour is measurement noise, and the paper’s ontology is false for the
domains the programme covers. Section 10.3 answers it directly.

Two more recent results bear on how strongly the programme should be read, and
both are recorded here rather than saved for the reply. A re-examination of how
range-restriction corrections have been constructed and applied concludes that
the common procedures systematically overcorrect, that the validity of many
selection procedures has therefore been substantially overestimated, and that
revised estimates place general mental ability considerably lower than the
earlier figure (Sackett et al., 2022). And within assessment centres, which are
among the instruments the programme cites, variance associated with the
exercise routinely dominates variance associated with the dimension the
exercise was designed to measure (Lance, 2008), which is situational
specificity appearing inside the apparatus rather than outside it.

3.5 Classification and Its Effect on the Classified

A judgment recorded about a person may alter the person or their circumstances,
and a literature on that possibility must be reported carefully, because its
strongest versions are not supported by its own evidence.

Interactive kinds and looping.
The foundational statement holds that classifications of people and the people
classified emerge together and interact, so that naming a kind of person alters
the space of possibilities for being a person of that kind
(Hacking, 1986). The mechanism is developed as a looping effect: those
classified become aware of the classification, respond to it, and thereby
change what the classification picks out (Hacking, 1995), so that kinds of
people are moving targets (Hacking, 2007). This anticipates a substantial
part of Section 16 and is conceded there.

Labelling and its subsequent modification.
Sociological labelling theory holds that deviance is a consequence of the
application of rules and sanctions rather than a quality of an act
(Becker, 1963), and distinguishes an initial act from the conduct produced
by the social response to it (Lemert, 1951); the associated account of
spoiled identity describes how a discrediting attribute reorganises a person’s
dealings with others (Goffman, 1963).

The subsequent history of this literature is the part that matters for
calibration. The strong reading, on which a label produces the behaviour it
names, was not supported, and the theory was revised by its own proponents into
a modified form in which the operative mechanisms are status loss, altered
relationships, exclusion, and reduced opportunity rather than the production of
labelled behaviour (Link et al., 1989). The consolidated statement treats stigma as
the co-occurrence of labelling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and
discrimination, conditional on the exercise of power (Link, 2001).

Section 16.3 accordingly rests on the mechanism this
literature supports, which concerns what becomes available to a person, and
does not rest on the mechanism it does not support, which concerns what the
person becomes.

Expectancy effects, at the size the evidence supports.
The general form of the claim is old (Merton, 1948), and its best-known
demonstration reported that induced teacher expectations produced measurable
gains in pupils (Rosenthal, 1968). That demonstration has a
critical record which must be reported with it. A reanalysis found the original
claims largely unsupported (Elashoff, 1971). A synthesis of eighteen
experiments found a mean effect on pupil measured ability of approximately one
tenth of a standard deviation, and found that the effect approached zero once
teachers had known their pupils for more than a short period before the
expectancy was induced (Raudenbush, 1984). The most careful assessment
concludes that classroom self-fulfilling prophecies do occur, that they are
typically small, that they do not accumulate greatly across perceivers or over
time and may be more likely to dissipate than to accumulate, and that teacher
expectations predict outcomes more because those expectations are accurate than
because they are self-fulfilling (Jussim, 2005).

The interpersonal demonstration of behavioural confirmation is a distinct and
narrower finding, in which a perceiver’s expectation shapes the interaction so
that the target’s behaviour comes to fit it (Snyder & Tanke, 1977). A related
literature on performance under the salience of a group stereotype
(Steele, 1995) has a contested replication record: a meta-analysis
in one applied domain reported a small effect together with several indications
of publication bias (Flore, 2015), and a review of replication
attempts found that a minority of unconfounded experiments reproduced the
original result (Stoet, 2012).

The paper uses none of these findings as load-bearing. They are reported
because a paper on this subject that omitted them would be assumed to be
relying on their strong versions.

3.6 Performativity of Descriptions in Social Life

A description of a social situation may contribute to bringing about what it
describes, and a literature has developed the conditions under which this
occurs.

The developed case concerns financial theory, where a model’s adoption altered
market practice so that prices came to conform more closely to it, a process
distinguished from the case in which a theory undermines its own conditions
(MacKenzie, 2006). The collection that consolidated the programme includes
both its development and vigorous objections to it
(MacKenzie & Muniesa, 2007), and the programme’s origin lies in work on the
constitution of markets by the disciplines that describe them
(Callon, 1998).

The discipline this literature imposes on the present paper is worth stating.
Performativity asserts something narrower than that an authoritative statement makes itself true. In the developed case the model’s adoption changed prices only because
using it did not generate arbitrage that would have destroyed it; a mistaken
formula would not have held (MacKenzie, 2006). Any claim in
Section 16 about a recorded judgment contributing to its own
confirmation is bounded by the same requirement, and the paper states the
mechanism rather than asserting the effect.

3.7 Evaluation of Selection Rules under Unobserved Outcomes

A decision that selects some and rejects others generates outcome data only for
those selected, and a formal literature addresses what can and cannot be
inferred from such data.

The problem has been stated precisely for algorithmic and human decisions
alike: outcomes are observed only for the cases a decision-maker passed
through, so a candidate decision rule cannot be evaluated against the outcomes
of the cases it would have treated differently, and the unobserved cases may
differ systematically from the observed on characteristics the analyst does not
record (Lakkaraju et al., 2017). Applied to judicial release decisions, the same
programme notes that outcomes are observed only for those released and not for
those detained, which makes evaluation of a counterfactual rule difficult and
requires explicit construction of unbiased decision counterfactuals
(Kleinberg et al., 2018).

Section 16.4 applies this directly. Where a
judgment of a person governs whether that person is admitted to a setting, the
judgment cannot be tested against what those excluded would have done, because
they were not admitted. The literature supplies the formal statement and the
paper supplies the consequence for the warrant of the judgment.

3.8 Boundary of the Present Contribution

Table 1 records what each literature licenses and where
this paper’s contribution begins.

| @P0.22YY@

Literature	Licensed role	Boundary of the present contribution
Political theory of representation	Election as a device of distinction (Manin, 1997); the several senses of
representation (Pitkin, 1967); selection of a type rather than measurement
of a quality (Mansbridge, 2009)	Asks who should judge and how often the judgment is renewed. It does not ask
what the judgment is a judgment of.
Social ontology	Conferred statuses that the person need not possess (‘Asta, 2018); status
functions in a context (Searle, 1995); grounding against anchoring
(Epstein, 2015)	Supplies the ontology, which is conceded. The transfer of a judgment between relational systems lies outside its treatment.
Production of the subject	The modes by which human beings are made subjects (Foucault, 1982);
individuation before the individual (Simondon, 2020)	The second-order question belongs to this lineage and is claimed as an
application, not as a discovery.
Personality and situation	Person, situation, and their interaction (Fleeson, 2009); if-then
signatures (Mischel, 1995); stable within-person distributions
(Fleeson, 2001)	Establishes the empirical terrain and constrains the ontology; the scope
consequence for judgments is drawn here.
Validity generalization	Situational specificity as an artifact (Schmidt, 1977; Schmidt et al., 1993);
operational validities across jobs (Schmidt, 1998)	The opposing position. The paper concedes its domain and disputes its
extension.
Classification effects	Interactive kinds and looping (Hacking, 1986; Hacking, 2007); modified
labelling (Link et al., 1989)	Supplies the mechanism for the return of a record upon a person; the paper
restricts itself to the opportunity mechanism the evidence supports.
Selective labels	Outcomes observed only for the selected
(Lakkaraju et al., 2017; Kleinberg et al., 2018)	Supplies the formal result; the consequence for the warrant of a judgment is
drawn here.
Opportunity and access	Access through weak ties (Granovetter, 1973; Granovetter, 1974); credentials
as entry licences (Collins, 1979)	Nearest neighbours to the account of transmission in
Section 9, and each stops short of it.

Table. Antecedent literatures and contribution boundaries

Four positions are left unoccupied by the literatures surveyed.

No treatment located here holds that an instrument of this kind transmits a
field of relational conditions rather than an account, and none draws the
consequence that such an instrument functions when the account is empty.

None unifies the case of the account written by its own subject with the case
of the account exchanged for something other than an account, by identifying
the single property that produces both.

None compares domains of person-judgment along the five dimensions of an
issuance regime, and none draws the resulting contrast between many weakly
placed issuers under guaranteed revision and few strongly placed issuers under
none.

And none proposes that the institutional and temporal remedy developed in
political selection, in which a judgment expires and must be renewed,
generalises to judgments of persons in other domains.

The claim is that these four are unoccupied, not that their components are unprecedented; the components are conceded above.

A bounded search for prior use of the paper’s own formulations, covering the transmission of a field of relational conditions by an instrument of judgment, the comparison of domains by their regime of issuance, and the generalisation of an expiring mandate to non-political judgments, returned no related scholarly use. A bounded search establishes that a formulation was not found rather than that it does not exist, and a systematic originality audit remains outstanding and is recorded in Section 19.

Three questions arising in this material belong to later papers in this series
and are marked where they arise rather than argued here: what a party who
issues a judgment of a person owes, which is the subject of the ethics paper;
how the conditions under which judgments are generated are distributed, which
is the subject of the injustice paper; and who holds authority to interpret a
shared experience, which is the subject of the jurisprudence paper.

4. Method and Selection of Cases

This section states the form of argument the paper attempts, why these two
cases were chosen, and what would count against the account.

4.1 Conceptual Analysis with a Stated Ontological Commitment

The paper is a work of conceptual analysis conducted under a stated ontological
commitment, and both halves of that description carry obligations.

The commitment is that what a relation generates is generated within it and is
available only from the positions its parties occupied. It is neither established here nor treated as self-evident. It has prior owners in social ontology
(‘Asta, 2018; Searle, 1995) and in the history of the subject
(Foucault, 1982), it is contested by a substantial empirical programme
(Schmidt, 1998), and it is constrained by findings about the
stability of within-person distributions across situations (Fleeson, 2001).
The paper states it, concedes its owners, reports what opposes it, and argues
about its scope.

The analysis then proceeds by asking what follows for the warrant of a judgment
if the commitment holds. Its results are conditional in form: given the
commitment, a judgment carries warrant of a certain extent and not beyond. A
reader who rejects the commitment can identify precisely which results fall
with it, and Section 10.3 states which do not.

Two obligations follow from the paper’s use of empirical literatures. Where a finding is contested or small, the paper reports it at the size the evidence supports and leaves it out of the argument’s foundations, as
Section 6.5 has already done. And where a
formal result is borrowed from another domain, the paper states the conditions
under which the result holds and claims none of them for itself.

4.2 Selection of the Two Cases

Two cases are examined and they were chosen to differ maximally along the
dimensions the paper’s argument identifies, while sharing the structure the
paper’s argument concerns.

The shared structure is the one set out in
Section 5.1: a judgment formed by a party standing
in a relation to the person judged, used by a party standing in no such
relation, to decide something affecting the person judged.

Political selection is examined because it is the case in which the
judging party’s relational access is weakest and the consequences are largest,
because the arrangement is very old and has been argued about continuously, and
because it has developed an institutional response that the other case lacks.
It is examined as a case rather than as the paper’s frame; the paper stands outside political theory and makes no claim about the justification of representative government.

Academic recommendation is examined because it is the case in which the
issuing party’s relational access is strongest and most private, because the
judgment is not revisable, and because it contains a limiting case, examined in
Section 9.1, in which the relation the account reports
does not exist.

The pairing is therefore chosen to hold the structure constant and vary the
issuance regime, and Section 15 states the five dimensions
along which the variation runs.

Three absences are recorded. Clinical formulation and actuarial risk assessment
are treated in Section 12 as sources of professional rules
rather than as cases, because what the paper needs from them is the rule and
not the practice. Performance appraisal is set aside, since the literature it would require overlaps almost entirely with the material already surveyed. And algorithmic assessment of persons is omitted, which is a substantial gap recorded in Section 19.

4.3 Conditions of Disconfirmation

The account should be narrowed or withdrawn under any of the following
conditions.

First, if attributes judged in one relation are shown to be exhibited at
similar levels across relations that differ in the respects the account
identifies as relevant, then the ontology is false for those attributes and the
scope condition of Section 11 has no application to them. The
validity-generalization programme asserts something close to this for a range
of work-related attributes (Schmidt, 1998), and
Section 10.3 concedes the domain in which it holds.

Second, if an instrument of the kind examined in
Section 9 is shown to function only where an account of a
genuine relation underlies it, then the transmission claim is false and the
instrument does carry what it purports to carry.

Third, if the five dimensions of an issuance regime do not distinguish the two
cases, or distinguish them in a way that does not track any difference in
outcome, the comparison in Section 15 is idle.

Fourth, if judgments that expire and must be renewed are shown to perform worse
than judgments that stand, the proposal of
Section 17.2 is wrong. The paper notes that this condition is testable in domains where both arrangements exist and leaves the test to further work.

Fifth, if the scope condition of Section 11 cannot be stated in a
form that permits a judgment to be assessed as within or beyond its scope, then
the condition is a slogan and should be withdrawn.
Section 12 treats professional rules that state such
conditions operationally, and the paper’s condition should be held to the same
standard.

5. The Generative Relational Account of the Judged Subject

This section states the ontology the argument uses. It is developed in four
steps, of which the first two are conceded to prior owners and the second two
are where the paper’s own work begins.

5.1 Co-Emergence of the Subject within Relational Systems

The framework may be stated in one sentence: it is a theory of how subject,
meaning, value, creation, and normativity co-emerge through generative
relational processes. Three consequences are used here.

The first is that what a relation produces is held by neither party. A working
relation generates undertakings, difficulties, judgments, and understandings
that neither participant would have produced alone and that neither possesses
afterwards as a person possesses a memory of a fact.

The second is that access to what a relation generated is positional. Each
party stands in the relation from somewhere, and that standpoint fixes what of
the relation is available to them. The differences between standpoints run along several dimensions rather than along a single scale of completeness.

The third is that a person’s attributes, as they appear in a relation, are
exhibited under the conditions that relation supplies. What a supervisor
observes is what the supervisory relation afforded, under the resources,
constraints, and demands that obtained.

None of this is original to the framework and the concession is made here
rather than later. The account of conferred social properties holds that a
status is imposed by others adopting an attitude toward a person, on the basis
of a property the person need not in fact possess, and that such statuses
consist in constraints and enablements, vary with context, and can be revoked
(‘Asta, 2018). The general apparatus of status functions assigned
collectively and holding in a context is older still (Searle, 1995). And the
priority of relations over the parties they relate is the founding commitment of
relational sociology (Emirbayer, 1997). What follows in this paper is an
application of these positions to a particular problem, and the problem rather
than the ontology is where the contribution lies.

5.2 Generation of the Relational Structure That Produces a Subject-Position

The framework asks a further question, and it is second-order with respect to
the preceding subsection.

To say that a subject is constituted within a relational structure is to
describe a synchronic relation between a person and a structure. The further
question is by what process the structure that produces subjects of that kind
was itself generated: what made available the positions that a person can now
occupy, and what closed off others.

The question belongs to an established lineage and the paper claims no
independence from it. The project of writing a history of the modes by which
human beings are made subjects is stated in exactly those terms in the work
that most influentially posed it, and the associated account holds that power
operates by structuring the field of possible actions available to others
(Foucault, 1982). The claim that individuation precedes the individual, so
that the individual is a provisional outcome of a process rather than its
starting point, belongs to the same family (Simondon, 2020).

An analytic distinction states the question more precisely than the paper could
otherwise. What makes a social fact obtain in a particular case is one
question; what sets up the frame principles under which facts of that kind are
possible at all is another (Epstein, 2015). The paper’s second-order
question concerns the second, and the vocabulary is borrowed.

Two uses are made of this and both appear later. In
Section 16.2 the institution that records a judgment is
treated as participating in the generation of the position the person
subsequently occupies, rather than as reporting on a position already held. And
in Section 9.2 the instrument is treated as altering
which positions are available, which is a claim about frame principles rather
than about the person.

5.3 Dependence of an Attribute on the Relation That Exhibits It

The preceding subsections support a claim about attributes, and it is stated
with the qualification the empirical literature requires.

An attribute of a person, as reported in a judgment, is exhibited under the
conditions the relation supplied. A report of it is therefore a report about
what that relation produced, and its extension to relations supplying different
conditions is an inference rather than an observation.

Claim ? is weaker than the ontology alone would license, and
the weakening is deliberate. It leaves open what the person carries across relations. The evidence indicates that they do: within-person
distributions of behaviour across situations have central tendencies that are
stable, even though the variability around them is very large
(Fleeson, 2001), and consistency recovered by aggregating across occasions
is substantial (Kenrick, 1988). What the claim asserts is that a
single report from a single relation does not distinguish the stable central
tendency from the variation, and that treating the report as though it did is
the inference at issue.

The formulation that fits the claim most closely holds that what is consistent
about a person is a profile of if-then contingencies rather than a level of a
trait, so that an attribute appears when the conditions eliciting it are
present (Mischel, 1995). On that account a report from one relation is
a report of one arm of such a profile.

A development of that formulation states the claim in relational terms
directly. On an interpersonal social-cognitive account of the self, knowledge
about oneself is linked to knowledge about significant others, each linkage
embodying a particular self-other relationship; variability across these
relational selves depends on interpersonal contextual cues while their
stability derives from the chronic accessibility of the corresponding
representations; and the whole functions in the if-then terms of the account
just cited, with relations supplying the conditions and relational selves the
consequents (Andersen, 2002). The underlying apparatus of relational
schemas, in which representations of self, of other, and of the expected
pattern of interaction between them are stored together and govern the
processing of social information, is older (Baldwin, 1992).

Two features of this literature bear on the paper and they run in the same
direction. It locates the variation in the relation rather than in
noise, which is what Claim ? requires. And it locates the
stability in the accessibility of representations carried by the person, which
is consistent with the concession made above: something is carried, and a
single report does not distinguish it from what the relation elicited.

A related result bears on the judging party rather than on the person judged.
The accuracy of a judgment depends on whether the relevant cues were available,
detected, and used, so that a judge’s access is a component of accuracy and not
merely of confidence (Funder, 1995).
Section 15.2 uses this.

5.4 Criteria the Account Imposes on a Judgment of a Person

The account yields four criteria. They are stated here so that
Section 11 through Section 17 assess judgments
against a standard fixed in advance rather than against observations gathered
afterwards.

• Statement of the conditions of exhibition. A judgment should state the conditions under which what it reports was exhibited: the position the judging party occupied, the period, and the resources and constraints that obtained.
• Restriction to the scope of access. A judgment should assert no more than the judging party’s position afforded, and should distinguish what was observed from what is inferred about relations the judging party did not enter.
• Availability of the person’s own position. The person judged occupies a position no other party occupies, and a procedure that excludes their account excludes a standpoint rather than a partisan submission.
• Provision for expiry and reopening. A judgment given durable institutional force should be renewable and revisable, so that it does not stand indefinitely on evidence generated at one time in one relation.

Two remarks about the criteria. They are requirements on the instrument and on
the procedure, and none of them requires the judging party to be more diligent
or more honest. And the fourth is not this paper’s invention: it is
institutionalised in one of the two cases examined, and
Section 13.3 describes it there.

6. What a Judgment of a Person Transmits

This section states the paper’s central ontological result. It proceeds from a
case in which the usual account of these instruments cannot be correct, states
what they transmit instead, and draws three consequences that the usual account
leaves puzzling.

6.1 Absence of a Transmissible Object in the Signed Blank

Consider a practice that is neither rare nor regarded as scandalous by those
who engage in it. A candidate asks a senior figure for an account. The reply is
that the candidate should draft it and the senior figure will sign. Or the reply
is that the candidate should send a curriculum vitae and a record of results,
from which the account will be written.

Four features of the case matter.

The instrument functions. It is accepted by the receiving institution, weighed
alongside others, and produces the same effects on the outcome as an account
written from long acquaintance would.

No shared experience is being reported. In the second variant the signatory has
observed nothing of the candidate at work; in the first the signatory has not
even composed the sentences. Whatever the instrument conveys, it is not an
account of what a relation between these two parties generated, because either
no such relation exists or nothing of it entered the document.

The parties regard the practice as legitimate. It is common enough to
have conventions, and those who use it describe it as a reasonable
accommodation to the demands on senior people’s time.

And the receiving institution cannot distinguish this instrument from any other. Nothing in the document records how it was produced. That a practice of this kind persists inside institutions which require the instrument is what should be expected of a formal structure adopted for the legitimacy it confers and decoupled from the activity it purports to govern (Meyer, 1977).

The consequence is decisive for the account usually given of these instruments.
If what they transmit were the content of a relation, then an instrument with
no relation behind it would transmit nothing and would therefore do nothing.
It does something. So what it transmits is not the content of a relation.

This bears on the preceding paper in this series, which read the requirement of
several references as an attempt to reconstruct a co-experience from
presentations taken at different standpoints. That reading holds where accounts
exist to be reconstructed from. The present case shows that the instrument
functions where they do not, so the reading describes what such instruments can
do at their best rather than what they do as such.

6.2 Transmission of a Field of Relational Conditions

What such an instrument transmits can now be stated.

An instrument of this kind transmits a field of relational conditions. It
alters the set of relations available to the person in the receiving system,
and it does so whether or not any account of a prior relation underlies it. The
account, where one exists, is the justification offered for altering the set,
and not the thing transmitted.

Claim ? uses the vocabulary established across this series. A
relational condition is an arrangement whose presence or absence changes which
relations can be formed or continued without determining which of them are, and
the field is the set of arrangements consistent with the conditions then in
place. An admission, an appointment, or a place on a shortlist is a change in
conditions of exactly this kind: it makes available relations with colleagues,
supervisors, resources, and institutions that were previously unavailable, and
it does so without determining which of them the person will form.

The claim is stated as a claim about what the instrument does rather than about
what its users intend. Those who write and read such instruments ordinarily
believe they are transmitting an assessment, and
Section 9.4 explains why the belief is natural and
why it survives.

Two neighbouring literatures come close to this and each stops short. Access to
opportunities is shown to flow through ties that carry no detailed information
about the person, which locates the mechanism in connection rather than in
content (Granovetter, 1973; Granovetter, 1974). And credentials are analysed as
licences for entry to positions rather than as measures of the productivity
they are taken to certify (Collins, 1979). A third and closer neighbour distinguishes mentorship, which supplies guidance,
from sponsorship, which supplies advocacy for advancement, and reports that
only the second is associated with promotion, so that those who are well
mentored and poorly sponsored advance less than those who are sponsored
(Ibarra & Carter, 2010). That distinction is the closest existing statement of the
difference between conveying an assessment and opening a position, and the
present claim is an extension of it. Three differences remain: the source is a
practitioner report rather than a study of the instrument’s mechanism; it
treats sponsorship as advocacy by a party who does know the person; and it does
not consider the case in which the advocacy proceeds without any observation at
all. All three are about opportunity rather than information, and none states
that the instrument functions when its informational content is null.

6.3 Reconfiguration of Generativity in the Receiving System

The consequence of a change in conditions is not itself an outcome. It is a
change in what outcomes become possible.

A person admitted to a setting enters relations that did not exist before, and
what those relations generate is produced within them, under the conditions
that setting supplies. On the account of Section 8, the
generativity at issue is a property of the relations and not of the person
carried into them. The instrument therefore alters the configuration within which capacities are exercised, rather than transferring a capacity, and what follows is generated there.

Three implications are recorded and used later.

The receiving system’s own conditions determine much of what follows, so that
the same person admitted to two settings may generate very differently in each,
and neither result is evidence about a property the person carried. This is the
ontological form of the observation in
Section 6.3 that behaviour reflects a large
person-by-situation interaction.

The instrument’s effect is therefore not well described as prediction. A
judgment that a person will do well, followed by their doing well, is
compatible with the judgment having been accurate and with the judgment having
opened conditions under which doing well became possible. The outcome leaves the two indistinguishable, and Section 16.4
states why they cannot be distinguished by the available data either.

And an instrument that opens conditions for a person whom no institution could
assess is doing something that no assessment could do. This is developed in Section 9.4 and is the reason the paper treats these instruments as a structure to be governed rather than as a pathology to be eliminated.

6.4 Separation of the Account from the Field It Opens

Claim ? separates two things that ordinarily travel together: the
account of a relation, and the alteration of conditions the account is offered
in support of. Three features of practice follow from that separation, and each
is otherwise puzzling.

An instrument with no account behind it functions.
This is the case of Section 9.1, and under
Claim ? it is expected rather than anomalous. What the receiving
institution acts on is the alteration of conditions that a recognised signature
authorises. The account is the stated ground, and the ground may be thin,
formulaic, or absent without the authorisation failing.

The instrument is exchanged for things that are not accounts.
Where an instrument can be issued without content, it can be issued for
consideration. The consideration may be an undertaking of future cooperation,
access to resources the person will acquire once the conditions are opened,
authorship, or continued association. Exchanges of this kind are recognisable to anyone who has been asked for one, and they follow from the instrument’s nature. They follow from it: an instrument whose force is separable
from its content is an instrument whose force can be traded.

This paper records the exchange and leaves its analysis to the political-economy paper. The circulation of
such instruments, the terms on which they are traded, and what accumulates to
those who issue them are the subject of the political-economy paper in this
series.

The instrument admits those whom no assessment could admit.
The same separation produces a consequence that counts in the instrument’s favour. A person whose
work no receiving institution is placed to evaluate, whose field is unfamiliar,
whose record is unconventional, or who comes from a setting the institution
cannot read, cannot be admitted on the strength of an assessment, because no
assessment is available. They can be admitted on the strength of an
authorisation. An instrument that opens conditions without requiring
assessable content is the mechanism by which the illegible enter systems that
cannot read them.

A parallel case is instructive without being decisive. Lending against
collateral admits only those who have collateral; lending on a group’s
undertaking admits those who have none, and thereby moves capital to people no
assessment reaches. The rigorous evaluations of that arrangement are sobering
about what follows: borrowing rises and some business investment rises, while
average consumption and several broader measures show no significant effect
(Banerjee et al., 2015; Banerjee & Karlan, 2015). The lesson the present paper takes concerns something other than microcredit. It is that opening conditions is a real and
distinct thing to do, and that opening them does not by itself determine what
is generated afterwards, which is precisely what
Section 9.3 claims.

The separability of the instrument’s force from its content is one property. It
is what allows an instrument to be traded for consideration other than an
account, and it is what allows a person no institution can assess to be
admitted. The two consequences are one feature of the instrument seen from two sides, rather than a defect and a benefit to be balanced.

Claim ? constrains what a reform can achieve, and
Section 17.4 states the constraint. A reform that ties
the instrument’s force tightly to verified content removes the exchange and
removes, by the same operation, the entry of those whom no verification
reaches.

7. Measurement and Reification as Rival Diagnoses of Assessment

Criticism of the assessment of persons ordinarily proceeds from one of two
claims, and the two are usually run together although they support different
remedies and are true in different places. This section separates them and
states where the boundary between them falls.

7.1 Assessment Treated as Measurement with Error

On the first claim, a judgment of a person is an estimate of a real quality
that the person possesses, and the estimate is degraded by noise and by bias.
The judging party observes imperfectly, brings expectations that colour what is
observed, and reports in a register that inflates or that varies by group.

The remedies follow directly and are familiar. Structure the instrument so that
every judging party answers the same questions. Train those who judge. Remove
or suppress the cues that carry bias. Aggregate across judges so that
independent errors cancel. Calibrate the judges against outcomes.

The claim is a serious position and a great deal of it is correct. The
measurement literature has established the reliability properties of such
judgments and the improvements that structure produces, and the professional
standards governing assessment are largely constructed on this claim. A paper
that treated it as an error would be wrong.

7.2 Assessment Treated as Reification of a Relational Product

On the second claim, the difficulty is not that the estimate is noisy but that
there is no quantity of the assumed kind to estimate. What was observed was
produced in a relation, under conditions that relation supplied, and the report
converts it into an attribute the person is said to possess.

The remedies of Section 10.1 leave this untouched and can worsen it. A structured instrument obtains the same relationally produced observation from every judge in a comparable form, which makes the resulting figure more reliable without making it a measurement of anything the person carries. A consistent reading of a measurement model requires that the unobserved variable exist and stand in a causal relation to its indicators (Borsboom & Mellenbergh, 2003); the reification claim is that in these cases it does not. Aggregation across judges who occupied similar positions
compounds the same conditions rather than cancelling error. Calibration against
outcomes calibrates against outcomes that were themselves produced under
conditions the judgment helped to open, which
Section 16.4 shows cannot be corrected from the
available data.

The distinctive prediction of the second claim is therefore that improvement on
the first claim’s terms will produce instruments that are more consistent, more
defensible, and no better founded.

7.3 Domains in Which Each Claim Holds

Both claims are true, in different places, and the paper’s contribution here is
the boundary rather than either claim.

The condition under which the first claim holds.
The measurement claim holds where three conditions obtain together: a construct
exists that the person carries across settings; the assessments are genuinely
parallel, in that each judging party is asked the same question about the same
construct; and the conditions of exhibition are comparable across the occasions
assessed. Where these hold, disagreement among judges is error, aggregation
recovers a true score, and the remedies of
Section 10.1 work.

That such conditions obtain for a range of attributes is the position of a
substantial programme, which holds that apparent variation in validity across
settings is an artifact of sampling error, unreliability, and range restriction,
and which reports general mental ability as generalising across jobs
(Schmidt, 1977; Schmidt et al., 1993; Schmidt, 1998). The paper concedes
the programme’s domain. Where a construct is measured directly, with a
standardised instrument, against a criterion recorded independently of the
judgment, the reification claim has no application.

The condition under which the second claim holds.
The reification claim holds where the reported attribute was exhibited under
conditions that the relation supplied and that are not reproduced elsewhere;
where the judging parties occupied different positions and were therefore not
answering the same question; and where the attribute reported is of the kind
that appears when the eliciting conditions are present rather than at a level
the person carries (Mischel, 1995).

The attributes that recommendation, appraisal, and endorsement most often
report are of this kind. Collegiality, initiative, judgment under pressure, reliability under a particular supervisor, and fit lack standardised instruments and independently recorded criteria. They are
reported by a party who stood somewhere, about conduct that occurred under
conditions that party partly constituted.

Results that narrow the reach of the measurement claim.
Two findings recorded in Section 6.4 bear here
and are used rather than merely noted. (1) The corrections that
produced the strongest generalization estimates have been shown to overcorrect
systematically, so that the validity of many selection procedures has been
substantially overestimated and revised figures are materially lower
(Sackett et al., 2022). (2) Situational specificity appears inside the
instruments the programme cites, since in assessment centres the variance
associated with the exercise routinely exceeds the variance associated with the
dimension the exercise was built to measure (Lance, 2008).

Neither result overturns the programme and the paper claims only that they narrow it. What they establish is that the domain in which the first claim holds is
smaller than its strongest statements suggest, which is what the boundary
argument requires.

What the empirical literature concedes in the other direction.
The paper owes a symmetrical concession. Within-person distributions of
behaviour across situations have stable central tendencies
(Fleeson, 2001), and aggregation across occasions recovers substantial
consistency (Kenrick, 1988). Something is carried across relations.
Claim ? was formulated to accommodate this: it holds that a
single report from a single relation does not distinguish what is carried from
what the conditions elicited, not that nothing is carried.

The boundary can therefore be stated in one sentence. Where the construct is
carried and the assessments are parallel, disagreement is error and should be
aggregated away; where the attribute is elicited and the positions differ,
disagreement is information about conditions and aggregating it away destroys
what there was to know.

8. Scope of a Judgment and the Standards That Already Index It

This section states the paper’s central normative result. It begins from a
principle that professional assessment has already established, states what
must be added when the judgment is not a score, and answers the objection that
the ontology destroys the criticism it was meant to support.

8.1 Validity of an Interpretation for a Specified Use

The principle the paper needs is already the professional consensus, and it is
stated here before anything is claimed.

The governing standards hold that validity is the degree to which evidence and
theory support the interpretations of results for proposed uses, and that
validation consists in accumulating evidence for those proposed interpretations
(Association & Association, 2014). Two consequences are explicit in that formulation. Validity is
a property of an interpretation for a use and not of an instrument, so that no
instrument is valid as such. And the validation argument is bounded by the use
for which it was built, so that using a result for a purpose outside that use
is not a weaker version of the same warrant but a question on which the
accumulated evidence is silent.

The unified conception behind the standards treats validity as one judgment
supported by several kinds of evidence, and locates the consequences of use
inside the validation argument rather than beside it
(Messick, 1989; Messick, 1995).

The paper therefore claims no novelty for the proposition that a judgment
carries warrant for a specified use and not beyond it. That proposition is the
settled position of the professions that assess persons formally. What the
paper adds is stated next.

8.2 Relational Indexing of an Observation

The standards specify a scope by naming a use. The judgments this paper examines are neither scores nor administered for a specified use; they are
accounts of what a relation produced, offered to whoever will read them. For
such judgments the scope must be specified differently.

A situated judgment carries warrant with respect to the relation in which what
it reports was exhibited. Its scope index is that relation: the position the
judging party occupied, the period, and the conditions under which the conduct
reported occurred. Warrant stops at relations supplying different conditions, and its extension beyond them is an inference requiring its own support.

Claim ? is the standards’ principle with the relation
substituted for the use, and three features distinguish it from a
straightforward transposition.

A use is specified in advance by the party constructing the instrument, whereas a relation arises without any such specification. Nobody designs a supervisory relation as an assessment
context, so the scope index must be recovered after the fact from the
circumstances that obtained.

A use is a category and a relation is a particular. Two candidates assessed for
the same use are assessed under the same specification; two candidates
described by two supervisors were described from two positions, and the
descriptions are not commensurable in the way two scores from one instrument
are.

And a use has an associated body of validation evidence, while a relation has
none. There is no accumulated evidence about what supervisory relations of a
given kind warrant, and Section 19 records the construction of
such evidence as the extension the account most needs.

8.3 Extrapolation beyond the Relation as a Scoping Error

Claim ? identifies what goes wrong when a situated judgment is
misused, and the identification matters because it selects the remedy.

The error is not that the judging party observed inaccurately. It may have
observed with complete accuracy. The error is that a warrant holding with
respect to one relation is exercised with respect to another, which is a
mistake about scope rather than about accuracy.

Two consequences follow and they run in opposite directions.

The first restricts what may be inferred. A supervisor’s accurate report that a
candidate worked poorly under close direction warrants nothing about how the
candidate works under autonomy, and the inference to the second is unsupported
however accurate the first is.

The second protects what may be inferred, and it is the reason the paper insists
on the scoping formulation. A report within its scope retains its full force.
The account does not hold that judgments of persons are worthless, that all
reports are equally good, or that criticism of a report is impossible. It holds
that a report warrants what its relation supports, which is a determinate
quantity that can be exceeded, met, or fallen short of.

8.4 Answer to the Objection That the Account Disarms Criticism

The objection is familiar in form. If attributes are relative to relations, and
no relation is privileged, then no report is better founded than another; the
complaint against a bad report loses its ground; and any proposed reform lacks
a criterion by which to prefer the reformed instrument.

The objection is a general one against constructionist accounts, which are regularly charged with removing the ground on which the criticism they motivate would stand (Hacking, 1999). It would succeed against an account on which validity is absent. It does not succeed against an account on which validity is indexed.

Under Claim ? a report can be assessed on three grounds that
survive the ontology intact. It can be assessed for accuracy within its
scope: whether what it reports of the relation is what occurred. It can be
assessed for whether its scope is stated, since a report that conceals the
conditions of exhibition prevents the reader from establishing its scope at
all. And it can be assessed for whether it is used within its scope, which is a
charge against the reader rather than the writer and is the principal charge
this paper makes.

The three grounds also supply the criterion a reform requires. A reformed
instrument is better if it states its conditions of exhibition, restricts its
assertions to what the judging party’s position afforded, and is used within
the resulting scope. These are the first two criteria of
Section 8.4, and they are neither vacuous nor
unmeasurable.

One residue survives the answer and is recorded rather than resolved. The
account supplies no way to compare two reports from different relations when a
decision must choose between the persons they concern. Selection requires
comparison, comparison requires a common scale, and the account holds that the
reports are not commensurable. Section 17.4 states
what the account can and cannot offer a party who must nonetheless decide.

9. Professional Rules Governing Judgment without Examination

The proposal of Section 11 is not new to practice. Professions
that judge persons formally have codified rules of exactly this shape, and this
section examines them. Their existence is the paper’s principal evidence that a
scope condition can be stated operationally rather than as an aspiration.

9.1 Limitation of Conclusions to the Access That Supports Them

The governing ethical standard for psychological assessment states the
condition in three parts, and each part corresponds to something the present
paper has argued for on other grounds.

The first requires that opinions contained in recommendations, reports, and
diagnostic or evaluative statements rest on information and techniques
sufficient to substantiate the findings (Association, n.d.). This is a
requirement about the relation between what is asserted and what supports it,
and it is the professional form of the second criterion of
Section 8.4.

The second is the one the paper most needs. Opinions about the psychological
characteristics of individuals are to be provided only after an examination
adequate to support the statements or conclusions; and where such an
examination is not practical despite reasonable efforts, the psychologist is to
document the efforts made and their result, to clarify the probable impact of
the limited information on the reliability and validity of the opinion, and to
limit appropriately the nature and extent of the conclusions or recommendations
(Association, n.d.). Three obligations are stated there and they map exactly onto
this paper’s argument. The conditions of access are to be recorded; the
consequence of those conditions for what the opinion is worth is to be stated;
and the conclusions are to be cut back to what the access supports. That is
Claim ? written as a professional obligation.

The third governs the case in which no examination is warranted. Where a
psychologist conducts a record review or provides consultation and an
individual examination is not necessary for the opinion, the psychologist is to
explain this and to state the sources of information on which the conclusions
rest (Association, n.d.). The rule therefore permits judgment at a distance. It requires that the distance be declared and that the sources be
named, which is a scope statement rather than a prohibition.

Related guidance for forensic practice develops the same requirements for a
setting in which opinions are given about persons who may not have been
examined and in which the consequences are severe (Association, 2013).

9.2 Opinions about Persons Not Examined

A stricter rule exists in the neighbouring profession, and it applies to
precisely the situation of the political case.

Psychiatric ethics provide that it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a
professional opinion about an individual unless an examination has been
conducted and proper authorization for the statement has been granted
(Association, n.d.). The rule was adopted after a magazine solicited psychiatric
opinions about a presidential candidate whom the respondents had never met, and
its scope was subsequently clarified to cover professional opinions generally
rather than diagnoses alone (Association, n.d.).

Two features of the rule bear on this paper.

The rule identifies the same defect the paper identifies, and identifies it as
a defect of warrant rather than of accuracy. The objection concerns something other than whether opinions offered about unexamined public figures will be wrong. It is that
nothing supports them, whatever their content, because the relation that would
supply support was never entered.

And the rule is contested in a way that illuminates the paper’s own problem.
Forensic practitioners routinely offer opinions from records without personal
examination, so a rule requiring examination in all cases sits awkwardly with
established practice, and the boundary between licensed and unlicensed judgment
at a distance is disputed (Kroll, 2016). The dispute is central to this paper; it is the paper’s question posed inside a profession that has
had to answer it operationally. What the disputants disagree about is exactly
where the scope of a judgment ends.

9.3 Features Common to the Rules Examined

Three features recur across the rules and each is used later.

(1) The rules regulate the scope of an assertion rather than the
accuracy of an observation. None of them tells the professional what to
conclude. They require that the conclusion not exceed what the access
supports, which is the distinction of
Section 11.3 in codified form.

(2) The rules require the conditions of access to be declared. The
psychologist who cannot examine must document the efforts made and state the
probable impact of the limitation (Association, n.d.); the psychologist
reviewing records must name the sources (Association, n.d.). Declaration is
treated as a substitute for access in respect of the reader’s ability to weigh
the opinion, though not in respect of the opinion’s warrant.

(3) The rules bind the party who issues the judgment and not the party
who uses it. This is their principal limitation for present purposes. A
psychologist who correctly limits a conclusion has no control over how the
limited conclusion is subsequently read, and nothing in these codes prevents a
reader from treating a properly scoped opinion as though it were unscoped.
Section 17.1 takes this as the gap the paper’s own
proposal must address.

The three features together establish what the paper needed from this section.
A scope condition of the kind Claim ? states belongs to practice rather than to philosophical aspiration. It is written into the ethical codes of professions
that assess persons under adversarial scrutiny, it is stated operationally
enough to be enforced, and its disputed applications concern where the boundary
falls rather than whether there is one.

Two absences are recorded. Conditions of applicability in actuarial risk
instruments, which specify the reference populations for which a score is
interpretable, would strengthen this section and are not cited, because the
manuals were not verified for this draft. And the equivalent rules in other assessing professions, including auditing and educational measurement, await survey.

10. Case Study: Selection of Political Candidates

This section examines the case in which the judging party’s relational access
is weakest and the consequences are largest. It is treated as a case and not as
the paper’s frame; nothing here bears on the justification of representative
government.

10.1 Judgment by an Electorate Standing in No Relation to the Candidate

The structural facts are these. Those who decide have not stood in any working
relation to the person decided about. What is available to them is public
performance, reported record, and the accounts of parties who claim closer
acquaintance. The decision is consequential and is taken at scale.

Under Claim ? the difficulty lies elsewhere than in the quality of the electorate’s judging. It is that most of what an electorate would need to know concerns
conduct in relations it cannot enter: how the person behaves toward colleagues
under pressure, whether commitments are kept when keeping them is costly,
whether advice is taken. These are exhibited in relations, and the electorate
occupies none of them.

The tradition has proposed three responses and each is a way of managing the
absence of access rather than of supplying it.

The first is filtration through better-placed intermediaries, in which those
with closer acquaintance select or screen, and the wider body chooses among
what they present. The founding American statement of the case is explicit about its purpose: the
sense of the people should operate in the choice, and that end is to be
answered by committing the choice not to any pre-established body but to
persons chosen for the special purpose, who will be most capable of analysing
the qualities adapted to the station and best placed to possess the information
and discernment such an investigation requires (Hamilton, 1788). The
argument is therefore not that the wider body judges well, but that a smaller
body chosen for the occasion judges better, which is a claim about relational
access rather than about legitimacy. The historical treatment shows that
arrangements of this kind were adopted in preference to selection by lot and
were understood at the time to introduce an aristocratic element, since
election systematically selects those an electorate perceives as distinguished
(Manin, 1997).

The second is the substitution of a different question. Rather than assess
qualities, an electorate may be understood to be identifying a type of person
whose own motivations align with what the electorate wants, so that resources
are invested in advance in selecting the type rather than afterwards in
monitoring conduct (Mansbridge, 2009). On that account the electorate attempts something other than the assessment the
paper says it cannot perform, which is a partial answer to the difficulty
rather than a solution to it, since identifying a type still requires evidence
about the person.

The classical statement of why that response is available holds that a
representative owes the constituents not industry alone but judgment, and
betrays rather than serves them by sacrificing that judgment to their opinion
(Burke, 1774). If what is selected is a person whose judgment will
thereafter be exercised rather than a programme to be executed, then the
electorate’s task is the identification of a person rather than the assessment
of a policy, and the difficulty this paper identifies applies to it with full
force rather than being avoided by it.

The third is aggregation. Whether many individually poorly placed judges
collectively judge well is disputed, and the classical passage on the question
supports more than one reading (Waldron, 1995; Ober, 2013; Cammack, 2013). The
paper takes no position and notes that the empirical work is likewise mixed:
poorly informed voters who read endorsement cues correctly can approximate the
choices of the well informed (Lupia, 1994; Popkin, 1991), and heuristics can
also mislead, unevenly across levels of sophistication (Lau, 2001).

10.2 Endorsement by Parties Claiming Relational Access

Endorsement is the political case’s instance of this paper’s object. A party
that claims to have stood in a relation to the candidate issues a judgment, and
parties that have not stood in any use it.

Three features distinguish endorsement from the academic instrument examined in
Section 14, and the comparison in
Section 15 develops them.

Endorsements are public. The endorser’s identity, the fact of the endorsement,
and often its wording are available to everyone, including to the candidate and
to those who would contest it.

Endorsers are numerous and heterogeneous. Colleagues, opponents, associations,
former employers, and journalists all issue judgments about the same candidate,
from positions that differ in the respects
that would alter what each is placed to observe.

And endorsement is one source among others. Public performance supplies direct
observation of a kind: how a person answers a hostile question, whether their
account changes between audiences, how they conduct themselves under sustained
scrutiny. This is thin evidence about conduct in working relations, and it is
evidence the electorate gathers itself rather than receiving at second hand.

10.3 Revisability of the Mandate as the Historical Remedy

The feature of this case that the paper takes as its principal result is that
the tradition solved a problem it could not solve.

It did not make electorates better judges of persons. The difficulty set out in
Section 13.1 is unchanged: those who decide
still lack access to the relations in which what matters is exhibited, and the
responses catalogued there mitigate the absence without removing it.

What was built instead was temporal. The judgment expires. A mandate runs for a
fixed period and must then be renewed; the person judged is subject to removal
in the interval under specified conditions; and the judgment made at one time
on inadequate evidence does not stand indefinitely on that evidence. Standard
treatments of representation record the non-binding character of what is
promised at election and the consequent centrality of the recurring decision
(Manin, 1997), and the conceptual literature distinguishes the several
senses in which a representative may be said to stand for or act for those
represented, each of which is renewed rather than settled once
(Pitkin, 1967).

The remedy is institutional and temporal rather than epistemic, and this is
what makes it generalisable. It leaves the judging party’s knowledge as it stands. It requires that the judgment be provisional, that its renewal be
scheduled rather than discretionary, and that the interval be short enough for
the accumulated evidence of conduct in office to bear on the renewal.

Two limits of the remedy are recorded and the paper claims for it only what they permit. The
renewal is made by the same body with the same lack of access, so what improves is the number of occasions rather than the quality of any single judgment, on which
a judgment can be corrected. And the evidence available at renewal is evidence
of conduct in the office, which is a relation the electorate still does not
occupy but whose products are at least public.

11. Case Study: Recommendation in Academic Selection

This section examines the case in which the issuing party’s relational access
is strongest and most private. It is examined here for what the judgment
warrants; the procedure by which such judgments are collected and read was
examined in the preceding paper in this series.

11.1 Judgment by Few Issuers with Private Access

The structural facts differ from the political case at almost every point.

The issuers are few, ordinarily two or three, and are nominated by the person
judged. Their access is genuine and often extensive: a supervisor may have
observed the candidate over years, in conditions no other party witnessed.

That access is private. What the referee observed is available to no one else,
including to the receiving institution, which cannot inspect the relation and
must take the account on the referee’s authority.

The account is ordinarily confidential to the person judged, so that the party whose trajectory it governs remains ignorant of its contents.

The instrument’s measured performance is correspondingly weak: accounts of this kind relate positively but weakly to later outcomes (Kuncel & Kochevar, 2014), and agreement between two referees describing one candidate is lower than agreement between two accounts written by one referee about different candidates (Aamodt, 2006). And the weight the account carries tracks the referee’s standing in a field rather than the extent of the referee’s access to the candidate, for the
reasons developed in the preceding paper: standing and access are generated in
different relations and nothing correlates them.

Under Claim ? the difficulty here is the mirror image of the
political one. In the political case the judging party lacks access and knows
it. Here the issuing party has access, and the receiving party cannot establish
what that access was, because the conditions of exhibition are not recorded and
the account is read as though it reported a property rather than a relation.

11.2 Issuance without an Underlying Relation

The limiting case examined in Section 9.1 belongs to this
case and is restated here for what it shows about the regime rather than about
the ontology.

Where an account is drafted by its own subject and signed, or written from a
curriculum vitae by a signatory who observed nothing, the instrument still
functions. Nothing in the receiving institution’s procedure distinguishes such
an instrument from one written from long acquaintance, because nothing in the
document records how it was produced.

Two features of the issuance regime make this possible and neither is present
in the political case. The account is private, so no party who could contradict
it sees it. And there is no record of the issuer’s past accounts against which
the present one might be read, so an issuer whose accounts are uniformly
favourable, or uniformly produced without observation, is indistinguishable
from one whose accounts discriminate.

11.3 Absence of Revision after the Judgment Is Acted On

The feature that most sharply distinguishes this case is what happens after the
decision.

Nothing expires. An account written at one time, about a relation obtaining at
that time, under conditions then in force, is acted on and then remains in a
file. There is no scheduled occasion on which it is renewed, no procedure by
which the person judged may seek its reconsideration, and no mechanism by which
subsequent conduct bears on it. The judgment that governed an admission is not
revisited when the admitted person’s work is observed directly, and the
judgment that governed a rejection is not revisited at all.

This is the fourth criterion of Section 8.4 entirely
unmet, in a case where the first three are also unmet, and it stands in the
sharpest possible contrast with the case examined in
Section 13.3, where the same criterion is the
constitutive feature of the arrangement.

12. Comparison of the Two Issuance Regimes

The two cases share the structure this paper examines and differ in the regime
under which judgments are issued. This section states the difference along five
dimensions and draws the consequence.

One preliminary. The contrast is drawn through the regime rather than through the motives of those who judge. Votes are cast for reasons of patronage, inheritance, identity, and
habit as much as for any assessment of a candidate, and accounts of candidates
are written for reasons of obligation, convenience, and expected return as much
as for any assessment. Motive leaves the cases indistinguishable, and a comparison
resting on it would be sentimental about one of them.

12.1 Distribution of Standing to Issue a Judgment

In the political case the standing to issue a judgment is distributed as widely
as the franchise, and each issuer’s judgment carries the same weight as any
other’s. Endorsers who claim relational access are numerous, arise without appointment, and compete with one another.

In the academic case the standing to issue is held by few, arises without any distributing rule, and carries weight in proportion to the issuer’s position in a
field. The candidate selects among those who hold it, which distributes access to issuers unequally in a way the preceding paper examined and this one does not. Selection on the receiving side compounds this, since employers have been found to weigh cultural similarity heavily and at times above productivity (Rivera, 2012).

12.2 Observational Access Available to the Issuer

The dimension on which the cases are most opposed is access, and they are
opposed in both directions at once.

The political issuer has weak access and it is public. What an endorser knows
of a candidate is often slight, and what any voter can observe directly is
thinner still; but the observations are available to everyone, can be checked
against one another, and can be contested by parties who observed the same
events.

The academic issuer has strong access and it is private. A supervisor may know
a great deal that no one else knows, and precisely because no one else knows
it, no one can establish what was known or whether the account reports it.

A related consideration bears on the weight attaching to prominent issuers. Across a large body of recorded predictions, expert forecasters were often only slightly more accurate than chance, and the most visible and most confident were among the worst calibrated (Tetlock, 2005). Since the accuracy of a judgment depends on whether the relevant cues were available, detected, and used (Funder, 1995), the political issuer is worse
placed to judge and better placed to be checked, and the academic issuer is
better placed to judge and cannot be checked at all.

12.3 Transferability of a Judgment between Holders

A vote resists transfer. It cannot be sold, lent, or exchanged for a future
undertaking; the prohibition is enforced; and an attempt to transfer it is a
recognised offence rather than an accommodation.

An account is effectively transferable, in the sense developed in
Section 9.4. Its force is separable from its
content, which is what allows it to be given in exchange for consideration
other than an account, and what allows it to be issued where no account exists.

This is the dimension on which the difference is starkest and on which the
academic case has no protection whatever, since the exchange leaves no trace in
the document and the document is not seen by anyone who could object.

12.4 Provision for Revision

In the political case revision is scheduled, guaranteed, and constitutive: the
judgment expires and must be renewed, and provision exists for removal in the
interval.

In the academic case there is no provision at all. The judgment is acted on
once and is neither renewed nor reopened.

Table 2 records the four dimensions together with a fifth, the
weight attaching to a single issuer’s judgment.

| @P0.24YY@

Dimension of the regime	Political selection	Academic recommendation
Standing to issue a judgment	Distributed as widely as the franchise; endorsers numerous and competing	Held by few; not distributed by rule; issuers nominated by the person judged
Weight attaching to one issuer	Equal across issuers, and fixed	Proportional to the issuer’s standing in a field
Observational access of the issuer	Weak, and public: checkable by others who observed the same events	Strong, and private: not establishable by any other party
Transferability of the judgment	Prohibited and enforced	Separable from its content, and exchangeable without trace
Provision for revision	Scheduled, guaranteed, and constitutive of the arrangement	Absent

Table. Two regimes for issuing judgments of persons

12.5 Findings of the Comparison

Three findings follow and they are the section’s purpose.

(1) The two regimes trade access against checkability, and they trade
it in opposite directions. Political selection accepts very weak access in
exchange for observations that many parties can check against one another.
Academic recommendation obtains strong access at the cost of observations that
no party can check. The paper leaves open which trade is the better one; what the comparison establishes is that the trade is
being made and is not acknowledged in either case.

(2) The dimension on which one case has a protection and the other has
none is revision, and it is the dimension least connected to the quality of any
single judgment. Political selection did not obtain better judgments. It
obtained the guarantee that a judgment would not stand indefinitely, and it
obtained that guarantee by institutional means available to any domain that
records judgments of persons.

(3) The academic case has no protection on any dimension where the
political case has one. Its issuers are few and unequally weighted, its access
is unverifiable, its judgments are exchangeable, and its judgments do not
expire. The paper draws no conclusion about which arrangement is better
overall, since the cases differ in purpose, scale, and consequence; it draws
the narrower conclusion that a remedy exists in one case, that it is
institutional rather than epistemic, and that its absence from the other is not
explained by any feature of the other.

13. Fixation of an Interpretation and Its Return upon the Person

A judgment formed in a relation does not remain a judgment. It is written down,
entered into a record, and acted on, and what follows is the subject of this
section. The section is written under a restriction stated in advance: the
literatures bearing on it report effects that are small, conditional, or
unreplicated, and the argument accordingly rests on the mechanism they support
rather than on the mechanism they do not.

13.1 Selection of One Interpretation from Several Available

What a relation generated ordinarily admits of more than one account, and the
account written is one of them.

A period of difficult work may be reported as evidence of a candidate’s
limitations under pressure, as evidence of an unreasonable set of demands, or
as evidence of a productive struggle from which something was learned. Each may
be an accurate report of what occurred; they differ in what they take the
occurrence to have been an instance of. Under
Claim ? this is what should be expected, since the conduct
was exhibited under conditions the relation supplied and the account must say
something about how those conditions bore on it.

Two features of the selection matter. It is made by one party, since the person judged stands outside it. And it is made once, at the moment the
account is written, under whatever understanding of the relation then obtained.

13.2 Persistence of a Fixed Interpretation in an Institutional Record

Once written and acted on, the selected interpretation acquires properties the
underlying judgment did not have.

It persists. The relation may end, the conditions may change, and the parties
may revise their understanding of what occurred; the record stands unchanged.

It becomes a fact of a different kind. What was one party’s account of a
relation becomes, in the receiving institution’s file, a datum about a person,
detached from the standpoint that produced it and from the conditions under
which the conduct occurred.

And it is inherited. Subsequent parties encounter the record rather than the relation, and their own judgments are formed with it already in place. The record is in this respect an inscription that travels while holding its shape, so that what circulates is the document and not the circumstances that produced it (Latour, 1986); where such records are made comparable on a common scale, what the scale does not carry becomes invisible rather than acknowledged as missing (Espeland, 1998); and the resulting ordinal positions shape the life-chances of those ranked (Fourcade, 2013).

A further consequence attaches only where the record is public. Parties who are measured alter their conduct in response to being measured, through self-fulfilling prophecy and through commensuration, so that a public measure changes the world it reports (Espeland, 2007). The records examined here are ordinarily confidential, which removes this consequence and removes with it any occasion on which the measure might be contested.

The literature on classification supplies the general form of what follows.
Classifications of people and the people classified emerge together and
interact, so that a classification alters the space of possibilities for being
a person of the kind classified (Hacking, 1986); those classified become
aware of the classification and respond to it, so that the kinds are moving
targets (Hacking, 1995; Hacking, 2007). This anticipates the present
subsection and is conceded.

13.3 Alteration of the Relational Conditions Available to the Person

The mechanism by which a record returns upon the person it describes is the
one this paper’s own account predicts, and it is also the one the empirical
literature supports.

A record governs admission. Admission alters which relations the person can
form, as Section 9.2 argued of the instrument generally.
What the person subsequently generates is produced in the configuration the
record helped to establish, and would have been produced differently in the
configuration the record foreclosed.

The sociological literature reached the same mechanism by revision rather than
by construction, and its history is the reason the paper relies on it. The
strong version of labelling theory, on which a label produces the behaviour it
names, was not supported by the evidence, and the theory was modified by its
own proponents into a form whose operative mechanisms are status loss, altered
relationships, exclusion, and reduced opportunity (Link et al., 1989); the
consolidated statement treats stigma as the co-occurrence of labelling,
stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination under conditions of
power (Link, 2001).

The mechanism the paper does not rely on should be named as plainly. It stops short of claiming that a recorded judgment alters the person’s dispositions through the expectations of those who read it. Effects of that kind are found,
and they are typically small, do not accumulate greatly across perceivers or
over time, may be more likely to dissipate than to accumulate, and are
accompanied by the finding that expectations predict outcomes more because they
are accurate than because they are self-fulfilling
(Jussim, 2005; Raudenbush, 1984). A related literature on performance
under stereotype salience has a contested replication record
(Flore, 2015; Stoet, 2012). The paper’s argument requires none
of this, and a reader should not supply it.

A discipline from the performativity literature applies here and is adopted. A
description contributes to bringing about what it describes only under
conditions, and the case in which this is best documented turned on the fact
that acting on the description did not generate forces that would have
destroyed it (MacKenzie, 2006). The present claim is correspondingly
bounded: a record alters what a person can do by altering what is available to
them, and the paper asserts no further mechanism.

13.4 Unfalsifiability of Outcome Data under Selective Observation

The final consequence concerns what can be learned about the judgment
afterwards, and it is the strongest result in this section because it is
formal.

Where a judgment governs whether a person is admitted, outcomes are generated
only for those admitted. The performance of those excluded goes unobserved, since they were never admitted, and the excluded may differ systematically from
the included on characteristics no one recorded.

The formal statement is established. Outcomes are observed only for the cases a
decision-maker passed through, so a candidate decision rule cannot be evaluated
against the outcomes of cases it would have treated differently, and the
unobserved cases may differ on unrecorded characteristics
(Lakkaraju et al., 2017); applied to release decisions, outcomes exist only for
those released and not for those detained, which makes the evaluation of a
counterfactual rule require explicit construction rather than direct
observation (Kleinberg et al., 2018).

Three consequences follow for the warrant of a situated judgment.

(1) Favourable outcomes among the admitted do not establish that the
judgments were sound. They are compatible with the judgments having been
accurate and with the judgments having opened conditions under which the
outcome became attainable, and Section 9.3
argued that the second is what the instrument does.

(2) The absence of adverse outcomes among the excluded is not evidence,
because there are no outcomes among the excluded. An institution that has
never admitted a candidate of a certain description has no basis for its belief
about how such candidates perform, and its confidence in that belief grows with
the length of time it has held it.

(3) Calibration of the judging parties against outcomes inherits the
problem. A proposal to score referees or endorsers against how those they
described subsequently performed can score them only on the admitted, which is
the sample the judgments themselves selected. The proposal retains some value, and Section 17.4 states what it can and
cannot deliver.

14. Consequences for What May Be Claimed of a Person

This section states what follows for practice. Three proposals are made and the third is borrowed. A fourth subsection states what the account
cannot supply.

14.1 Relation-Indexed Statement of an Observation

The first proposal follows from Claim ? and from the first two
criteria of Section 8.4.

A judgment of a person should state the relation with respect to which it
carries warrant: the position the judging party occupied, the period, the
conditions under which the conduct reported occurred, and the respects in which
the judging party’s view was partial. It should distinguish what was observed
from what is inferred about relations the judging party did not enter.

Section 12 established that requirements of this shape are
already codified. The psychologist who cannot examine must document the efforts
made, state the probable impact of the limitation on the reliability and
validity of the opinion, and limit the conclusions accordingly
(Association, n.d.). What the present proposal adds is the substitution of the
relation for the examination as the thing to be declared.

The gap identified in Section 12.3 bears directly on
what such a proposal can achieve. These rules bind the party who issues a
judgment and not the party who uses it, and a properly scoped statement can be
read as though it were unscoped. The proposal therefore has a second limb which
is the one that matters: the receiving party is obliged to establish the scope
before relying on the judgment, and to treat a judgment whose conditions of
exhibition are not stated as one whose scope cannot be established. Under
Section 11.3 the principal error is the reader’s, and
the principal obligation is correspondingly the reader’s.

14.2 Expiry and Reopening of a Fixed Interpretation

The second proposal is a generalisation of established practice rather than a
novelty, and the paper states it that way.

A judgment of a person that is given durable institutional force should expire.
It should be renewable on a scheduled occasion rather than at the discretion of
those who hold it, and the person judged should have a route by which its
reconsideration may be sought in the interval.

That is what political selection built, as
Section 13.3 described: fixed terms, scheduled
renewal, and provision for removal. The arrangement did not improve the
electorate’s access to the relations in which what matters is exhibited. It
ensured that a judgment made on inadequate evidence would not stand
indefinitely on that evidence.

Three features of the generalisation are worth stating.

It addresses the difficulty the account identifies rather than the difficulty
the measurement claim identifies. It leaves the accuracy of judgments where it found it, and attempts nothing there. It bounds the period over which a judgment formed in one
relation governs a person’s trajectory.

It is available to any domain that records judgments of persons, since every capacity it requires is one that recording a judgment already requires.

And it is the only one of the paper’s proposals that survives
Section 16.4. A proposal to improve judgments must
be evaluated against outcomes, and the outcomes are selectively observed. A
proposal that judgments expire requires no such evaluation, since its
justification is that the evidence supporting a judgment ages rather than that
the judgment was poor.

14.3 Availability of the Position of the Person Judged

The third proposal follows from the third criterion of
Section 8.4 and is stated briefly because the preceding
paper in this series develops it.

The person judged occupied a position in the relation that no other party
occupied, and holds an account of the conditions under which the conduct
reported occurred. A procedure that excludes it excludes a standpoint. Where
the account is collected, it should be collected as a source and read against
the others rather than as a submission answering them, and it should be
collected before the other accounts arrive so that it cannot be composed in
response to them.

The proposal bears on the ontology as well as on fairness. Under
Claim ? what a receiving party most needs, and least
possesses, is the conditions of exhibition; and the person judged is one of the
two parties in a position to state them.

14.4 Limits of the Remedies Proposed

Four limits are recorded and none is answered.

Absence of a procedure for comparison.
Selection requires choosing among persons, choosing requires comparison, and
comparison requires a common scale. The account holds that accounts from different relations resist commensuration, and it supplies no procedure for comparing them. What it supplies to a party who must nonetheless decide is
narrower: a reason to treat the comparison as an act performed by the deciding
party on incommensurable materials, rather than as a reading of a quantity the
materials contain, and therefore a reason to record how the comparison was
made.

Tying force to content removes what the instrument does best.
Claim ? holds that the separability of an instrument’s
force from its content is one property with two consequences. A reform that
tied force tightly to verified content would suppress the exchange of
instruments for consideration, and would by the same operation close the route
by which persons no institution can assess are admitted. The paper declines to propose such a reform and records that any proposal in that direction incurs this cost.

Calibration inherits the selection problem.
Scoring the parties who issue judgments against subsequent outcomes can score
them only on those admitted, for the reasons given in
Section 16.4. Such a record would establish whether
an issuer discriminates among the candidates who were admitted, which is worth
knowing and is less than it appears.

Declaration as a substitute for access.
Every proposal in this section improves what a receiving party knows about the
conditions under which a judgment was formed. None of them gives the receiving
party access to the relation. The account holds that such access is
unobtainable in principle, since the relation is over and the receiving party
was not in it, and the proposals accordingly improve the handling of a
limitation rather than removing it.

15. Implications for the Generative Relational Framework

Four results return to the framework and two of them are corrections.

15.1 Fields as Objects of Transmission

The framework has treated a field of relational conditions as something a party
maintains, governs, or damages. Claim ? adds that a field can be
transmitted: an instrument issued in one system can alter the conditions
obtaining in another, and can do so without conveying any content about the
system it was issued in.

Two consequences follow for the framework’s own vocabulary. The governance of a
field, which the first paper in this series treated as a matter of what a
custodian does within a system, must also cover what enters a system from
outside it. And the instruments by which fields are altered across system
boundaries are a class the framework has not identified, of which
recommendation, credentialling, licensing, and admission are members.

15.2 Separability of an Authorisation from Its Justification

Claim ? states a structural feature that the framework
should carry beyond this paper. Where an instrument’s force is separable from
the account offered in its support, the instrument can be issued without the
account and can therefore be exchanged for other things; and by the same
property it can admit those for whom no account could be constructed.

The framework’s normative vocabulary has tended to treat the alienation of a
relational product as a defect. This case indicates that the same structural
property produces the defect and the benefit, and that a framework which
condemns the first without noticing the second will recommend reforms that
close entry to those who most need it. That is a general caution and not a
feature of recommendation.

15.3 Revisability as an Institutional Rather Than an Epistemic Remedy

The framework treats revisability as a requirement on interpretations. This
paper finds it institutionalised, in one domain, as a remedy for a problem that resisted epistemic solution, and finds that its justification there does
not depend on the judgment having been poor.

Two things follow. The framework’s revisability requirement acquires a
precedent of the first rank, in constitutional practice, which is stronger
support than a philosophical argument would supply. And the framework acquires
a distinction it has not drawn: between revisability sought because a judgment
may be wrong, and revisability sought because the evidence supporting a
judgment ages. The second justification is available even where the judgment
was as good as it could have been, and it is the one
Section 17.2 relies on.

15.4 Limits of the Framework’s Reach into Assessment

The framework’s ontology entails a claim about attributes that the empirical
literature only partly supports, and the correction should be carried back.

Behaviour reflects person, situation, and a large interaction between them;
within-person distributions across situations have stable central tendencies;
and aggregation across occasions recovers substantial consistency
(Fleeson, 2001; Kenrick, 1988; Fleeson, 2009). A framework holding
that attributes are generated in relations must therefore be stated in the
weaker form of Claim ?, which concerns what a single report
from a single relation can distinguish, rather than in a form that denies that
anything is carried.

The general lesson is that the framework’s ontological commitments have
empirical consequences in domains where those consequences have been measured,
and that it should be stated in forms that survive the measurement.

16. Limits of the Account

16.1 Conditions of Falsification

Section 7.3 stated five conditions and their
status is as follows.

Whether attributes are exhibited at similar levels across relations differing
in the respects the account identifies is settled in favour of the account for
some attributes and against it for others, and the boundary of
Section 10.3 is argued rather than demonstrated. The
paper concedes the domain of the validity-generalization programme
(Schmidt, 1998) and relies on two results that narrow it
(Sackett et al., 2022; Lance, 2008). No study on the attributes the paper is most
concerned with is available.

Whether an instrument of the kind examined in
Section 9 functions where no account underlies it is asserted
from a practice the paper describes and does not document. No systematic
evidence about the prevalence or the effects of instruments issued without
observation was located, and the argument would be strengthened considerably by
any.

Whether the five dimensions of an issuance regime track differences in outcome
is untested. Section 15 establishes that the two cases differ along them and leaves open whether the differences matter.

Whether judgments that expire perform better than judgments that stand is
untested, and the paper notes that domains exist in which both arrangements are
found.

And whether the scope condition can be stated operationally is answered
affirmatively by Section 12, which finds it stated
operationally in professional codes (Association, n.d.). This is the condition
the paper meets most securely.

16.2 Claims Advanced Without Support

Three claims rest on argument alone.

Claim ?, that such instruments transmit a field of relational
conditions, is argued from the case of the instrument issued without
observation and from the vocabulary of the preceding papers. Evidence about what receiving institutions do with such instruments would be required to establish it.

Claim ?, that one property produces both the exchange
and the admission of the unassessable, is a structural argument. The parallel
case cited in support concerns lending rather than judgment
(Banerjee et al., 2015).

And the account of what political selection achieved, in
Section 13.3, is a reading of an institutional
arrangement rather than a finding about it. Others read the same arrangement
differently, and the treatment relied on here itself emphasises the aristocratic
element in election (Manin, 1997).

16.3 Sources Not Yet Verified

This draft cites only sources verified against a publisher, journal, index, or
institutional page before the section using them was written, and several
literatures are consequently represented thinly or not at all.

The political-theory section rests on three treatments
(Manin, 1997; Pitkin, 1967; Mansbridge, 2009) together with two primary
statements (Hamilton, 1788; Burke, 1774) and the accountability programme
(Przeworski & Stokes, 1999; Manin & Przeworski, 1999; Fearon, 1999). The nineteenth-century arguments
about the qualifications of electors and representatives are absent, as is any
citable edition of the classical text whose disputed reading
Section 6.1 records. The section remains a
positioning of the paper’s question rather than a survey of the tradition.

Conditions of applicability in actuarial risk instruments are absent from
Section 12, which weakens the precedent that section
supplies and is now the principal omission of this kind.

And the literature on sponsorship as distinct from mentorship, which is the
closest existing treatment of an instrument that opens opportunity rather than
conveying information, is absent from
Section 9.2, which is the paper’s most novel claim and
therefore the place where an unacknowledged neighbour would matter most.

16.4 Extensions

Four extensions are identified and none is attempted.

The construction of validation evidence for classes of relation would supply
what Section 11.2 identified as missing: a use has an
associated body of evidence about what it warrants, and a relation has none.
Evidence about what supervisory, collaborative, or adversarial relations
typically afford would make relational indexing operable rather than merely
statable.

An empirical study of the two-claims boundary would settle
Section 10.3, and is feasible, since the prediction is
that structuring and aggregating judgments of elicited attributes will improve
consistency without improving foundation.

A treatment of algorithmic assessment of persons is absent from this paper and
is the most consequential omission, since such systems fix interpretations at
scale, are unusually resistant to expiry, and are evaluated against outcomes
that are selectively observed in exactly the way
Section 16.4 describes.

And a design for scheduled expiry in a non-political domain, specifying who
initiates renewal, on what evidence, and with what effect on the intervening
period, is what Section 17.2 proposes and does not
supply.

17. Conclusion

A judgment of a person is formed inside a relation and used outside it. That is
the situation of a letter, a rating, a formulation, and a vote, and this paper
has asked what such a judgment warrants once it has left the relation that
produced it.

The question is old and the paper claims no novelty in asking it. What it adds
is that the tradition asked who should judge and how often the judgment should
be renewed, and did not ask what the judgment is a judgment of. Under the
commitment used here, an attribute reported in such a judgment was exhibited
under conditions the relation supplied, so that a report of it is a report
about what that relation produced. The claim was stated in a form the empirical
literature permits: not that nothing is carried across relations, but that a
single report from a single relation does not distinguish what is carried from
what the conditions elicited.

Two claims about the assessment of persons were separated. On one, a judgment
is a noisy estimate of a real quality and the remedies are structure,
aggregation, and calibration. On the other, there is no quantity of the assumed
kind, and those remedies produce more reliable estimates of nothing. Both hold,
in different places, and the boundary was stated: where the construct is
carried and the assessments are parallel, disagreement is error and should be
aggregated away; where the attribute is elicited and the positions differ,
disagreement is information about conditions and aggregating it away destroys
what there was to know.

A limiting case then established something the usual account of these
instruments cannot accommodate. A referee signs an account drafted by its
subject, or writes from a curriculum vitae, and the instrument functions
exactly as it would otherwise. If what such instruments transmitted were the
content of a relation, an instrument with no relation behind it would do
nothing. It does something. What it transmits is a field of relational
conditions: it alters the relations available to the person in the receiving
system, and what follows is generated there. The account is the justification
offered for altering them, not the thing conveyed. From this one property come
both the exchange of such instruments for undertakings that are not accounts,
and the admission of persons for whom no account could be constructed. These are one feature seen from two sides rather than a defect and a benefit to be balanced, and a reform that removed the first would remove the second.

The scope condition the paper proposes is already familiar in practice. Professional
codes already require that an opinion about a person rest on adequate
examination, that the impact of limited access be stated, and that conclusions
be limited to what the access supports. What the paper adds is the substitution
of the relation for the examination as the thing to be declared, and the
observation that these codes bind the party who issues a judgment and leave the
party who uses it unconstrained, although the principal error is the user’s.

Two cases were compared through the regime under which judgments are issued
rather than through the motives of those who issue them. They are mirror
images: political selection accepts very weak access in exchange for
observations many parties can check, and academic recommendation obtains strong
access at the cost of observations no party can check. On four of five
dimensions the academic case has no protection where the political case has
one, and the dimension on which the difference is starkest is the one least
connected to the quality of any single judgment.

That dimension supplies the paper’s proposal, and the proposal is borrowed.
Political selection did not solve the problem of judging a person one cannot
know. It made the judgment expire. Fixed terms, scheduled renewal, and
provision for removal are institutional and temporal devices that leave the
epistemic difficulty untouched and prevent a judgment formed at one time on
inadequate evidence from governing indefinitely. This is the only proposal in
the paper that survives the finding that outcomes are observed only for those
selected, because its justification is that evidence ages rather than that a
judgment was poor.

What the account withholds is recorded. It offers no way to compare
accounts from different relations when a decision must choose between the
persons they concern. It cannot recommend tying an instrument’s force to
verified content without closing the entry it also enables. It cannot rescue
calibration from the selection problem. And none of its proposals gives a
receiving party access to the relation, which is unobtainable in principle,
since the relation is over and the receiving party was not in it. The proposals improve the handling of a limitation and leave the limitation in place.

Acknowledgments

The present definitions, constructions, arguments, conclusions, and errors
remain the author’s responsibility. The interest arising from the author’s own
position with respect to the procedures examined in
Section 14 is declared in the front matter.

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