The Wound Test: Distinguishing Live Inquiry from Sealed Elaboration

A field of inquiry can produce technical novelty in abundance while ceasing to expose its protected commitments to defeat. The difficulty in saying when this has happened is that every criterion located in the output is retrospective: a sophisticated tradition generates new abstractions whether it is discovering or merely elaborating, and whether a given abstraction mattered is settled only by its downstream career. This paper offers a narrower diagnostic: not a demarcation criterion for science as such, but a prospective, regime-level test for whether a field's protected core remains vulnerable. The wound test asks whether the core is reachable, here and now, by a constraint the field does not control, legible under standards the field must recognize, and consequential for what the field rewards. The defeater is generalized beyond empirical corroboration: a proof, counterexample, archival discovery, rival school, conceptual contradiction, failed interpretation, or practical breakdown may wound a regime. The test is distinguished from its nearest neighbours in Popper, Lakatos, Longino, Laudan, MacIntyre, Murphy, and recent social epistemology of theology. A heuristic case from Nyāya and Buddhist epistemology illustrates a phase-shift within a single tradition. Three limits are stated.