Salience, Manipulation, and Control — A Structural Account

This paper develops a structural account of salience and examines how manipulation and control operate through salience without bypassing, replacing, or overriding agency. Salience is treated as a pre-interpretive constraint that conditions which informational transitions become available for valuation and action. Manipulation is analyzed as restructuring salience rather than inducing deception or altering preferences, and control is characterized as constraint shaping rather than authorship replacement. The account shows how action spaces may be narrowed or closed without negating agency, and why responsibility attribution must be addressed at downstream regimes.