# Four-axiom explanatory presentation

**Status:** explanatory guide. The Formal Specification and Scope and Commitments govern the theory; this note organizes their machinery for study.

## Why these four headings are coherent

1. **Actual Framing** identifies what is relevant to explaining this judgment rather than reality or available cognitive material in general. The active interpretation and the route that actually helped produce the judgment are separate computational tests within that shared principle.
2. **Evaluative Grounding** states the general evaluative prerequisite. Explicit, attributed, and encoded evaluation are alternative ways of realizing that prerequisite; encoded evaluation is not an additional prerequisite of the same rank.
3. **Normative Detachment** identifies the conditions under which a framed, evaluatively structured process forms a supported normative output.
4. **Relational Moral Type** adds the qualifying relationship and same-path contribution conditions that distinguish moral from nonmoral normative output.

## Four explanatory axioms and their computational components

### Actual Framing

- **Interpretive frame:** which interpretation of the situation is active?
- **Producing route:** which represented elements actually helped form this judgment?

### Evaluative Grounding

- **Evaluative prerequisite:** what makes one option, outcome, or response matter differently?
- **Realization routes:** is that difference explicit, attributed, encoded in a control role, or derived from those sources?

### Normative Detachment

- **Working model:** bring the active frame and operative evaluation into a usable decision or appraisal model.
- **Supported output:** form a candidate judgment and retain it only when a live support path reaches the output. Detachment means the judgment is formed; it does not mean that the person acts on it.

### Relational Moral Type

- **Represented relationship:** is a subject–object relationship part of the active frame?
- **Relation qualification:** does that relationship meet the relevant relational and evaluative conditions?
- **Same-path moral classification:** did the relationship organize and bear on the process that produced this judgment?

## How to use the presentation

Architecture and Theory in Action show nine component boxes in the subsystems where they operate. The theorem and corollary layer names the component-specific commitments it uses. Local Plurality is a consequence of NDT’s descriptive scope rather than a fifth axiom.

The four headings do not claim that the full formal theory has a uniquely natural minimum basis. The linked independent basis audit records the alternative terminal structures and target-relative bases that limit that stronger conclusion.