The Five Classes of Dimensional Judgment: A Structural Taxonomy of Cognitive Bias

The cognitive-bias literature has produced a catalog of hundreds of named biases without a unifying structural account of why these biases and not others exist. This paper proposes that judgment runs four dimensional operations in a fixed sequence, recognition, contextualization, resolution, action, and that bias arises when the sequence fails to close in order. The five non-empty classes of dimensional judgment error follow from the dependency structure of the four dimensions. The signalless frame names the failure where contextualization operates without recognition having delivered the current signal. The frameless verdict names the failure where resolution operates without contextualization having delivered the frame. The unresolved commit names the failure where action operates without resolution having delivered the determinate state. The signalless verdict names the failure where resolution operates at the direct recognition-to-resolution path without recognition having delivered the targeted referent. The signalless commit names the catastrophic failure where action commits without recognition having admitted anything to commit on. A sixth potential class (contextualization-to-action without resolution) is structurally empty under the architecture's closure: every path from contextualization to action passes through resolution, and the architecture admits no clean contextualization-to-action shortcut. The architectural derivation of the dependency structure and the empty-cell closure lives in Stewart (2026e, 2026f, 2026g, 2026z). Each of the five non-empty classes corresponds to a named pattern in the cognitive-bias literature. Class 2-1, the signalless frame, captures persistent-state biases where the frame the resolution operates on carries content the present recognition admission did not deliver (anxious vigilance, ambient prior-state contamination of present judgment). Class 3-2, the frameless verdict, captures the canonical frame-mismatch biases (anchoring, framing, base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, hindsight, in-group bias, status-quo, planning fallacy, confirmation bias). Class 4-3, the unresolved commit, captures commit-before-resolve biases (belief perseverance, sunk-cost). Class 3-1, the signalless verdict, captures determination-without-referent biases (the conjunction fallacy in the Linda paradigm, the availability heuristic). Class 4-1, the signalless commit, captures confabulation and the strongest action-before-recognition failures. The taxonomy generates six predictions. Cross-task individual-differences correlations should be strongest among biases sharing a structural class and weakest across classes. Reaction-time signatures should differ systematically across the four dimensions' associated neural-loop timings. Neural-timing signatures should locate each class's primary deviation at a specific loop. Pharmacological targets should produce class-specific bias-profile shifts. The architecture forbids a sixth non-empty structural class, forbids the catastrophic failure (Class 4-1) without its constituent edge-failures (Classes 2-1, 3-2, 4-3), and forbids reversing the dependency direction at dimension 1, since recognition has no earlier dimension within the cycle to be displaced before. The neural-architecture derivation, the substrate-scale architecture, and the path-algebra structure are inherited by citation (Stewart, 2026a, 2026e, 2026f, 2026g, 2026z). The philosophical reframe of bias as architectural default rather than error against an imported standard is developed in *Cognitive Bias as Default Setting* (Stewart, 2026w). The methodological reframe of the canonical paradigms as probes of specific dimensions is developed in *Cognitive Bias Paradigms as Dimensional Probes* (Stewart, 2026aw). This paper develops the structural taxonomy and the empirical-signature predictions both companion papers depend on. **Keywords:** cognitive bias, four-dimensional judgment, recognition, contextualization, resolution, action, five classes of error, structural taxonomy, default setting, heuristics and biases, judgment cycle, recursion joint, hindsight bias, conjunction fallacy, availability heuristic, belief perseverance, sunk-cost, confabulation, reaction-time