Split-Domain Cognition
A principle for keeping language work and judgement work structurally apart — in tools, practices, and institutions reasoning about human work.
When language work and judgement work are fused in a single call, certain failures appear reliably: verdicts that cannot be audited, descriptions that smuggle evaluation, rubrics that cannot be taught, drift under pressure, sycophancy in machines. SDC is the refusal of that collapse.
The principle was named inside Koher, a practice that builds free, open-source tools on it, and it turned out to be older and wider than the practice that named it. In those tools a language stage reads, deterministic code carries the judgement, and what narrates the result had no hand in deciding it. That is one instance rather than the definition, and it is the most exacting one, because code has to say exactly where the reading stops and the deciding starts — a boundary that can be left unstated anywhere else. The variants catalogued here make the same move in curation, in urban planning, in animal rights, in psychiatric diagnosis: domains where the stakes differ and no code is involved at all.
The default we refuse
The tacit collapse SDC names — language and judgement happening in the same breath — stated plainly.
Read02 · In briefThe principle, condensed
A one-page condensation of the canonical claim, its mechanism, and what the architecture protects.
Read03 · VariantsDomains worked out
Animal rights, curation, user research, urban planning, psychiatric diagnosis, data work, talent valuation, the cognitive scale — eight variants drafted, more coming.
See the catalogue04 · AdoptionThe four forms of follow
Support, reference, alignment, derivation. Each with different honesty conditions. Each with a badge.
See the badges