La Profilée - The Cognition Programme: A Structural Audit of Persistence and Identity Across Cognitive Science

La Profilée is a universal structural law of persistence under transformation. Cognition is the third and highest rung of the natural-domain ladder: physics is the persister, biology the self-maintaining persister that acts on its own persistence, and cognition the persister that represents the conditions of its persistence and steers by the representation. The differentia of the rung is the detachable stand-in — an internal state that covaries with an external condition yet can be entertained in its absence, and used to guide action when the condition is not currently sensed. This catalogue does for cognition what the Physics, Biology, and Chemistry Programme Catalogues do for their domains. It is an audit register: where established cognitive science already applies an identity or persistence criterion without stating one, what follows when the criterion is made explicit, and what status each finding carries. The four-step protocol is unchanged. Present the cognitive science completely without the law; audit it for implicit persistence and identity structure; insert the law explicitly; catalogue the consequences by class. Two disciplines govern this domain, and the second is unusual. The first is the no-content rule that has held since the physics work: nothing here derives a brain, a neuron, a representational format, a concept, or a psychology — these are realizations, and they appear only as the reading of forced abstract structure. The second is unique to this rung. Everything derived here is functional and structural: it forces what a cognition must do. It says nothing, and can say nothing, about whether any of it is experienced. That boundary is not this catalogue’s evasion; it is a result, stated in §CR-9 and again in the closing status.