No Neutral Stopping: Preference-Load in Maintained Explanatory Frontiers

This paper argues that any explanatory stopping point that is not merely left unexpanded but actively maintained as a principled boundary carries a structural property called preference-load. The paper asks what follows once one grants that finite explanatory delivery must stop somewhere and abandons the stronger aspiration to internally certify a stopping point as the finally authorized terminus of inquiry. Its answer is that maintained stopping is never neutral. Once all actually delivered inferential content is compressed into a consolidated inferential body, what remains at issue is not the inferential work already completed but the stopping-point configuration that sustains it and the boundary-maintenance standards by which that configuration is held in place. A Supplementary Lemma shows that any maintained frontier must include at least one untriggered candidate consideration under a suppressive substantive boundary judgment. Lemma 1 then constructs a non-trivial alternative configuration by a minimal local revision of that judgment while preserving the delivered inferential body and the inferential principles already in use. Lemma 2 shows that this revision generates a boundary pressure-point: a commitment not borne by the original configuration and one whose acceptance forces revision of the original boundary. The main theorem follows: every maintained stopping point is a single-valued commitment within a space of constructively available alternatives. Preference-load names that uncancelled structural burden.