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KFD-4

Views must remain bound to declared perspectives

Decision metadata

Number
4
Stable URL
https://kfd.libkungfu.dev/4
Source path
decisions/KFD-4.md

KFD-4: Views must remain bound to declared perspectives

  • Status: active
  • Number: 4
  • Kind: principle
  • Applies to: any adopting product, repository, release surface, extension surface, hosted surface, or participant-facing interface that presents a perspective-bearing view or uses one to guide action

One sentence

Views must remain bound to declared perspectives.

There is no useful view from nowhere. A view preserves enough of its observer, accepted facts, position, and transformation history for another participant to understand, reproduce where possible, and challenge it.

Decision

A perspective is the position from which facts become relevant, objects become visible, and consequences are borne. It may belong to a user, developer, agent, runtime, product surface, organization, or later auditor.

Different perspectives may accept the same causal facts while exposing different natural objects and boundaries. Consensus, authority, aggregate statistics, and model output remain perspectives; scale does not turn them into final reality. Perspective is therefore not error, and facts are not arbitrary.

KFD-4 requires perspective-bearing views to remain declared and intentionally transformable. A transformation changes observer, role, consequence, proximity, accepted evidence, or action boundary to test what the current view hides.

Reference-frame rule

KFD-4 replaces the fiction of absolute context with reality-preserving frames of action. A frame declares the observer position, accepted fact cut, projection boundary, consequence position, and known gaps from which a view is formed.

Changing frames may change coordinates, relevance, presentation or priority ordering, natural object boundaries, and available action. It must not silently change the identities, source roots, evidence cuts, known causal relations, receipts, or declared authority boundaries on which comparison depends. A valid transformation makes both the variation and the preserved invariants inspectable.

This is not relativism. Views may differ while their claims remain unequally supported, and known causal facts still constrain every frame. The purpose of a declared frame is to make disagreement and transformation auditable, not to make every interpretation true.

Perspective transformation is one discovery method, not a ranking theorem. Direct judgment, anomaly, repeated reconstruction, causal-variable discovery, structural compression, and hybrid methods may also generate primitive candidates. KFD-4 governs their prior boundary: every observation remains situated and auditable.

Once KFD-1 through KFD-3 already preserve fact cuts, make reconstruction trust assessable, and enable trusted exchange among participants, perspective transformation is the smallest new general operator: change a declared position, replay existing evidence with declared loss, and contrast the natural objects that appear. Under that installed foundation, it is the lowest-marginal-cost default probe for moving the observation horizon.

This is a bounded engineering hypothesis, not a universal ranking theorem. Unavailable source perspectives, privacy constraints, capture or reconstruction cost, replay loss, or a cheap domain-specific anomaly, causal, or compression method may reverse the comparison. KFD-5 still qualifies every candidate against facts and consequences.

Engineering objects

Reliable perspective transformation depends on three connected objects:

  • A perspective-bound timeline preserves an observer, accepted facts, natural objects, consequences, causal order, evidence boundary, and degraded state.
  • A perspective-preserving replay reconstructs a source view for another participant without claiming to become the source observer or filling gaps with generated certainty.
  • A contrastive replay compares two or more preserved views in one declared context while keeping their observers and fact cuts distinct.

The goal is low marginal transformation cost, not fictional zero cost. Capture, privacy, redaction, reconstruction, and interpretation remain real costs. Missing context remains visible as degradation.

Without perspective-bound timelines, replay loses the view that made facts meaningful. Without replay, a durable view remains locally trapped. Without source-preserving contrast, comparison creates another undeclared synthetic perspective.

Gate

KFD-4 applies when observer position can materially change interpretation, ordering, relevance, object boundaries, consequences, or action. The declaration may be natural language, structured metadata, or a domain-specific contract. Reproducible projection, transformation, or comparison claims should use a machine gate.

A conforming claim:

  • identifies the observer and useful position;
  • exposes accepted facts, the evidence cut defining what evidence was available at that point, gaps, and degraded states;
  • states what changed in a transformation and what became visible;
  • identifies replay sources, reconstruction policy, preserved elements, loss, and verification state;
  • preserves source perspectives and declares the shared context in contrastive replay;
  • obeys known causality and does not invent evidence;
  • does not silently promote a default, consensus, developer, or model view into final reality;
  • represents the affected participant when consequences are asymmetric.

A purely local operation that makes no perspective-bearing claim does not need a KFD-4 gate.

Authority boundary

A participant has local epistemic priority over consequences it directly bears. Its report can be preserved as a fact; its wider interpretation remains a claim. Perspective does not make first-person experience infallible, require agreement, imply a global observer, or certify a primitive. KFD-5 qualifies primitive candidates.

KFD-4 does not claim that all interpretations are equally supported, that causal facts are relative, or that perspective transformation is the unique or superior genesis method. Calling a claim “only a perspective” does not remove responsibility for its use or consequences.

Relation to KFD-1 through KFD-3

KFD-1 makes timelines evidentiary.
KFD-2 makes replay trustworthy.
KFD-3 makes contrastive replay cooperative.
KFD-4 makes perspective transformation operational.

KFD-4 is the first operating application of the foundation triad. KFD-5 begins at its declared-perspective boundary and separately qualifies any candidate produced by perspective or another declared method.

Verification

The @kungfu-tech/kfd package publishes observer-timeline and perspective-replay profiles under schemas/kfd-4/. Package wiring, the Kungfu perspective-infrastructure case, and adopter responsibilities are documented in docs/KFD-4-usage.md and docs/foundation.md. Historical and product cases remain explanatory, not normative.

Adopters

Adopters cite KFD-4 when a view or action depends materially on observer position. They own evidence that a concrete capture, replay, or transformation is faithful.