Interpretation, Learning, and Empathy as One Constraint: A Residual-Adequacy Architecture with Accountable Abstention

ArXi:2605.24999v1 Announce Type: cross An agent must act on the situation before it, learn what it cannot yet represent, and model other agents well enough to coordinate. These faculties are usually realized by separate mechanisms, yet they share a failure mode: the situation can exceed what the agent can currently represent, and the honest response is then a principled refusal that says what was missing. We develop a small cognitive architecture in which these limits arise from a single quantity.