Perceptive Closure: Identifying Authorization-Resource Counterfactuals

Resource-specific claims about governed authorization—for example that representation is unnecessary, substitutable, or structurally required—are themselves counterfactual claims. We ask when such claims are identified. For a sealed authorization target, PERCEPTIVE CLOSURE (PC) represents evidence admission ($E$), certificate representation ($R$), and epistemic authority ($A$) as extensional contract coordinates and evaluates closure under every subset freeze. A complete contract yields a resource-freezing signature $K_{\Pi }$; source/specification evidence $\Omega$ yields the compatible identified set ${\mathcal{K}}_{\Pi ,\Omega }$. We prove three stages. First, unrestricted controller behavior need not identify resource-freezing dependence: behaviorally equivalent systems can have arbitrary finite differences, or finite-versus-structural differences, under an $R$ freeze. Second, one fixed implementation description can admit source-consistent $E$- and $R$-typed completions with different freeze values. Third, conditional on explicitly declared semantic anchors and the source-exposed intervention boundary, touch is mechanically determined; interface-equivariant resource-support bisimulation is a sufficient certificate for invariance across interface-preserving refactorings. We then show that this identification boundary is operational rather than merely constructed. Apache Polaris is naturally $E/R$ boundary-underidentified, whereas a pre-existing XACML 3.0/AuthzForce 21.2.0 environment point-identifies an evidence-touching repair with T(q) = E, $K_{\Pi }=[1,\infty ,1,1,\infty ,\infty ,1,\infty ]$, $|{\mathcal{K}}_{\Pi ,\Omega }|=1$. The XACML policy and native engine are unchanged and no manual $E/R/A$ action labels are used. PC-TAU supplies controlled nondegenerate freeze geometry, and live tool-use episodes establish finite-fallback realizability. PC does not claim prevalence, universal safety, causal decomposition inside mixed actions, or a universal $E/R/A$ ontology. Its claim is narrower: planning evaluates closure under a specified resource counterfactual; PC asks whether that resource counterfactual is warranted by the declared semantics in the first place.