The Logic of Assent Instrument (LAI) — Version 0.3
The Logic of Assent Instrument (LAI) — Version 0.3
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Version Note
v0.3 supersedes v0.2. It is a formalization release: no application is added and no scope is extended. It adds a provenance labelling convention, distinguishes the impression from the proposition it presents, restates the condition set as two primitive states and one derived sequence, fixes the evidential status of each of the three marks separately, adds Agent and Evidence Status to the ledger, and supplies a proposition-identity rule. Three items in the applications section are narrowed. Section V stands as ratified in v0.1. The three declared-open items stand unresolved.
0. Provenance Labelling
Every rule in this instrument carries one of three labels:
- [S] — Sterling-stated. The rule appears in his words in a named source.
- [I] — corpus-supported inference. Derived from Sterling or from ratified corpus, but not stated by him.
- [D] — LAI design decision. Neither stated nor derived; adopted because the notation requires a determination.
The convention generalizes what earlier versions did once, at Section V. It makes the instrument auditable under the Corpus Claim Audit.
Purpose
The Logic of Assent Instrument is a notation whose primitive is the act performed on a proposition rather than the proposition itself. The Propositional Logic Conversion Instrument renders prose as explicit propositions. The Sterling Logic Engine audits a case against a fixed proposition set and issues a correspondence verdict. Neither carries notation for an agent taking up a proposition at an instant. LAI fills that vacancy.
Plain statement. Existing instruments handle what is believed and whether it is true. This one handles the taking-up itself — the moment a man accepts a thought or declines to.
Scope Limit
LAI is descriptive and evaluative only. It is not a decision procedure. A notation able to compute what a man will assent to next would contradict C2 — Libertarian Free Will, the origination of assent — in the very act of formalizing it. LAI states structure and evaluates correctness. It does not predict. [D]
I. Objects
An impression presents a proposition. [S] — Excerpt 7: impressions are not uninterpreted raw data but ideas claiming that the world is a certain way.
LAI does not operate on the impression. It operates on the proposition the impression presents, and records what the agent did with that proposition. [D]
The distinction is load-bearing. The presence of an impression is not an act. In ordinary speech — it broke my heart — the arrival of the impression and the agent’s assent are run together, and that running-together is the error the instrument exists to separate.
Four layers, not five: impression, then the proposition presented, then assent or withholding, then longitudinal disposition.
There is no judgment layer standing between assent and disposition. [S] — Proposition 12 and The Assent Threshold and the Excerpt 10 Seam: the pathos is not downstream of the false assent as a separate event; it is the false assent, or its affective face, and there is no intermediate stage.
Propositions are partitioned into three mutually exclusive sorts [I]:
- Value-neutral — assertions about external states of affairs.
- Value-bearing — predications of good or evil, or of preferred or dispreferred indifferent status.
- Action-bearing — propositions directing a course of action.
II. Conditions
Two primitive states [S]:
- Assent to the proposition.
- Withholding from the proposition.
One derived sequence [S] — Excerpt 7: rejection of a proposition is withholding from it, then the contrary formulated, then assent to the contrary.
Rejection is not a third condition standing alongside the two primitives. It is a trajectory through them, and the notation admits no direct rejection operator. [D]
Plain statement. Refusing a thought and believing the opposite are not the same move. The second takes three steps, and a notation that lets it happen in one has misdescribed what a man does.
III. The Act
Assent is binary. There are no degrees. [S] — Propositions 12 through 15 as a biconditional.
Assent is ordinarily inexplicit. [S] — Sterling’s own report is that the acceptance was so simple and momentary that it seems as though things passed directly from impression to belief, though that is not how it works. The notation carries no predicate for introspective availability.
The act is binary; the longitudinal state it affects is not. [I] An impression-type strengthens or weakens by degree, as Section VII states, and this must not be read back into the act. Graded disposition does not entail graded assent.
IV. Time
The time index is dense. There are no idle intervals: withholding is a standing condition rather than an absence, so at every instant the agent stands in some condition toward a given proposition. [D]
This is to be checked against P2 of Virtue Is at Stake at Every Moment, which asserts that at every waking moment the agent performs at least one act of will, and which is the proof’s only premise not itself a numbered line.
V. Formulation
Formulating a true proposition is an action following assent to an action-proposition, under Proposition 15. The will touches only assent. Formulation is therefore not a second operator standing beside assent in the notation. [I]
Ground. Extending Proposition 15 to a mental act is inference. Excerpt 10 draws its line between the choice and what one physically does, and Sterling does not address the formulation case directly. The ruling is recorded; the ground is marked as inference rather than as his stated words.
VI. Evaluation
Correctness is assent to what is true. The evaluation predicate takes the act and the truth-value of the proposition. It takes no outcome argument. [S] — Excerpt 10: the choice is appropriate or inappropriate at the instant it is made, and it is irrelevant if the man is struck by a car, the colleague changes his mind, or the restaurant proves closed.
Truth is fixed independently of the agent by C5, the Correspondence Theory of Truth. This is what separates LAI from every logic of belief built on coherence among the agent’s own commitments.
Register One delivers appropriateness. [S] Its predicate pair is appropriate and inappropriate. It does not deliver virtue. Excerpt 10 states that one cannot perform one virtuous action, and virtue is the terminus of Register Two — the settled disposition, reached by no single act.
Register Two is causal, not evaluative. [S] It issues no verdict and carries no verdict column. It records direction only: an impression-type strengthened or weakened. Excerpt 7 warrants direction and warrants no rate, coefficient, or magnitude, and it calls formation a long process.
VII. Update
A causal update function operates on the impression stream. [S] — Excerpt 7: assent makes an impression of that type more common and stronger, refusal makes it rarer and more easily resisted.
No update function operates on the act. [I] C2 is enforced at this point and at no other. The stream of inputs is caused; the act taken upon an input is not.
Plain statement. What comes into a man’s head tomorrow depends on what he accepted today. What he does with it when it arrives does not.
VIII. Content
Acts of will have content, and the content is the result at which one aims. [S] — Theorem 24.
Reservation is an operator on the content of an action-bearing proposition. [S] — Excerpt 10: the aim is not the outcome but the outcome if it is possible. The man aiming to eat at the restaurant aims at eating there if that can be done, and is therefore untroubled to find it closed.
The condition is possibility, not determination. Excerpt 10 frames the reservation through the will of the gods taking precedence, and Theorem 21 carries Sterling’s own note that Providence creates a problem for those Stoics who are strict determinists. The operator is defined on possibility alone. No determinist premise enters it.
IX. Detection
Whether an act occurred is determined by the three marks established in The Assent Threshold and the Excerpt 10 Seam. The three marks do not share an evidential status, and the ledger must not treat them as interchangeable.
Mark One is constitutive. [S] The seam document, citing Seddon’s Glossary and The Two Clauses v1.1, states that the presence of a pathos is not a sign that assent occurred — it is the assent, seen affectively. Mark One is therefore not inference from symptom, and the ledger records it as identity rather than as evidence.
Mark Two is corroborative. [I] That the proposition is still held, and would be affirmed if asked, records a standing assent. It does not by itself locate when the assent occurred.
Mark Three is corroborative and causally weak. [I] Strengthening of an impression-type over an arc cannot be attributed to a particular prior assent unless competing sources of the same impression-type have been excluded. Where the source supplies an independent occasion producing the same type, Mark Three is marked ambiguous and attributes nothing.
Mark Three operates longitudinally only. [S] It cannot be applied to a single event, and a ledger may not record it confirmed on the strength of one act.
All three marks are consequential or longitudinal. None is available at the instant the mental event occurs. The threshold is determinate in principle and undetectable in the moment, and the notation states both without contradiction.
The residual band stands unfixed. [S] Where a somatic event falls between an intense startlement and a brief low-grade pathos, the ledger marks it unclassified. It may not be resolved to a first movement by fiat. Confident classification of a borderline case is the named failure mode of this instrument.
X. Declared Open
The available-stock parameter. Clause (d) instructs the agent to formulate true action-propositions. Under Section V this requires prior assent to an action-proposition, which must itself already be available. The regress terminates in doctrine received — a man cannot formulate what he was never given. Two agents facing the same impression therefore differ in what counter-proposition is to hand. The corpus does not state this anywhere. LAI forces it into the open and does not resolve it.
The residual band. The boundary between an intense startlement and a brief low-grade pathos is not sharp. The seam document states plainly that nothing in the corpus fixes that band. Nothing here fixes it either.
The verdict on withholding. Correctness is assent to what is true. No version of this instrument has stated what verdict a withholding receives. Withholding from a false proposition and withholding from a true one are not the same act, and Proposition 12 says only that nothing follows from refusal. The instrument cannot score withholding until this is settled.
XI. Gate Status
The corpus side of the Source-Opening Gate is discharged: Sterling on Kataleptic Impressions v1.1; The Assent Threshold and the Excerpt 10 Seam v1.0; Three Defenses v1.4; Nine Excerpts 4(g), 7, 9, and 10, each read whole.
The archive side is not discharged. The International Stoic Forum threads in which assent is argued have not been retrieved for this instrument. LAI makes no claim in Sterling’s voice beyond the sources named above.
XII. Ordinary Language
Every formula introduced in a later version carries a plain-language gloss at first use, under the Ordinary Language Standard. Dual presentation throughout: the notation and its statement in ordinary English, neither standing alone.
XIII. Ledger Format
A run produces a table with seven columns: agent; time index; node; evidence status; operative state and marks; Register One verdict; Register Two direction.
Agent. [D] Every entry names whose act is being audited — character, narrator, quoted speaker, author. Without this column the pipeline will attribute a character’s proposition to the narrator or to the author, which is the attribution-voice discipline failing at the level of format rather than of care.
Evidence status. [D] One of: explicit, reported, derived, longitudinally inferred, unclassified. The statement my poverty is an evil is explicit. Repeated avoidance of financial risk is derived, and may not be entered at the same weight.
Register One entries are appropriate, inappropriate, or unclassified. Register Two entries record direction only. Formulation does not appear as an operator: where a true proposition is formulated, the ledger records the prior assent to the action-proposition that produced it, and if that assent is not present in the source, the ledger marks the gap rather than supplying it.
XIV. Compound Rejection
Impression presented: p
|
+---------+---------+
| |
assent withholding
|
contrary formulated?
|
+---------+---------+
| |
bare withhold assent to contrary
[rejection complete]
Rejection is the full path. A ledger showing withholding without the contrary formulated and assented to has recorded a bare withhold, not a rejection.
XV. Pipeline
Prose
|
v Stage 1 — PLCI
Explicit propositions, sorted by type
|
v Stage 2 — LAI
Assent ledger
PLCI extracts. LAI marks what was done with each proposition. Neither stage supplies what the source does not contain.
XVI. Applications
The Narrative Presupposition Audit. Narrative supplies the longitudinal span that real-time observation denies. Mark One is available within a scene, Mark Two across chapters, Mark Three across the arc. The pipeline converts claims about propositions, assent, and longitudinal formation into auditable structure. It does not convert character analysis as a whole: symbolism, irony, unreliable narration, and authorial strategy lie outside it.
The Classical Presupposition Audit. The Expository Exception turns on demonstrating absence of distancing across a declared locus, which is a negative test. The pipeline replaces it with a positive one: for each proposition, whether it is asserted, attributed, hypothetically presented, or merely represented — with assent classified separately where the evidence permits. The term entertained is withdrawn as too broad to do the work.
The Sterling Logic Engine. Step 4 infers false judgment from emotional evidence without stating a derivation. Mark One supplies it, and the direction of inference must be stated in full: a pathos is detected; it is the evaluative proposition seen affectively; assent to that proposition therefore occurred; the judgment is false if the proposition is false. Never pathos to false judgment directly, which would formalize the shortcut the instrument exists to repair.
The Folk Psychology Audit. In ordinary speech — it broke my heart, I had no choice — the pipeline shows the failure as a deleted node rather than a faulty inference. The impression-to-outcome chain runs with the assent position empty.
XVII. Synthetic Output
LAI does not audit machine-generated text.
The warrant is detection, not metaphysics. All three marks are consequential or longitudinal: a pathos or an impulse, a proposition still held later, an impression-type strengthened for next time. None is available on a token stream. The audit cannot run, and this holds without settling what does or does not occur inside the generator.
Machine output is therefore handled as an unassented impression stream, to be audited against the six commitments by the agent receiving it. The corrective layer is not relieved by this instrument.
XVIII. Proposition Identity
Longitudinal tracking requires a rule for when two occurrences count as the same proposition. Without one, the auditor decides what counts as the same impression-type, and Mark Three becomes unfalsifiable. [D]
Three grades:
- Same — identical propositional content, however worded.
- Equivalent — differing content entailing the same value-predication over the same object.
- Related — sharing a theme but not the predication.
Only Same and Equivalent occurrences may be tracked as one item for Marks Two and Three. Related occurrences are logged separately.
My illness is ruining my life and I cannot bear what has happened to me are Related, not Equivalent: the second predicates nothing about the illness. Merging them because they serve one thematic reading is a named failure.
Declared limit. The boundary between Same and Equivalent is a judgment the instrument does not mechanize. Where it is contested, the ledger logs both occurrences separately and states the contest.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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