Event Restricted Temporality and the Problem of Time

This paper’s central claim is that time is not a universal background; temporal parametrization is a regime‑restricted tool licensed only by irreversible outcome‑fixing facts. The paper therefore develops a three‑regime discipline—structural, retentive, and event—defined by predicate admissibility, and uses it diagnostically to locate where temporal predicates are well‑typed and where they are undefined. Structural and retentive descriptions are non‑temporal by meaning rather than by approximation. Only event descriptions, in which an irreversible outcome‑fixing fact is asserted, license before/after orderings and time‑parametrized dynamics. On this view, timeless canonical formulations and ordinary time‑dependent modelling are jointly correct, each within its proper descriptive domain. The paper formulates this restriction as an explicit domain‑of‑definition condition (“Echo Time”) and uses it to reclassify a broad family of standard temporal questions in canonical quantum gravity as ill‑posed because the required temporal operators are undefined on structural and retentive domains.