Hermeneutic Compression: Interpretive Closure and the Loss of Judgment-Relevant Difference

Hermeneutic Compression: Interpretive Closure and the Loss of Judgment-Relevant Difference This preprint develops a conceptual and documentary framework for identifying hermeneutic compression: an interpretive relation in which a judgment about a whole becomes resistant to correction by material differences within its constituent parts. The framework specifies four jointly necessary conditions: (1) cross-level framing; (2) predicate migration between levels of interpretation; (3) loss of a judgment-relevant difference under the original operative question and evaluative standard; and (4) material obstruction of the ordinary route through which differentiated evidence could correct the judgment. The article also proposes a case-local, audience-indexed maintenance hypothesis. The interaction between migrated predication and obstructed corrective access may explain why an inherited judgment persists among recipients who did not produce the original interpretive error. Four documentary analyses examine the framework: Nietzsche's posthumous The Will to Power, Australia's Robodebt scheme, the United Kingdom's Horizon-related prosecutions, and S and Marper v. United Kingdom. The first three support qualified affirmative classifications, while the fourth serves as a negative control, demonstrating that disagreement or subsequent judicial reversal does not itself establish hermeneutic compression. The contribution is situated within philosophical hermeneutics and compared with neighbouring accounts of epistemic injustice, rule entrenchment, ecological inference, and interpretive closure. The framework includes explicit conditions for refusing classification and identifies avenues for independent replication. The study is conceptual and documentary. Its causal proposal remains local, defeasible, and subject to further empirical examination. Author: Luiz Guilherme Cardoso MollAffiliation: Researcher and Professor, Universidade Luterana do Brasil (ULBRA), Canoas, BrazilORCID: 0009-0005-5824-2736Publication type: PreprintVersion: v1Year: 2026DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23321753