Endpoint Indeterminacy

Institutional outcomes are often interpreted as though their observed composition directly reveals the mechanism that produced them. A demographic imbalance among executives, judges, professors, elected representatives, students, professionals, managers, or offenders may therefore be treated as evidence of selection, exclusion, preference, bias, culture, merit, or discrimination at the endpoint itself. This working paper argues that such inference is analytically underdetermined. It introduces the Endpoint Indeterminacy Proposition: observed distributions at institutional endpoints do not uniquely identify the stage or mechanism through which those distributions were generated. An endpoint composition may arise through direct selection at the observed stage, earlier candidate-pool formation, attrition, differential transition rates, hierarchical filtering, cohort replacement, institutional reform, or combinations of these processes. The paper therefore develops a general framework for analysing institutional outcomes through sequential candidate-pool formation, stage-specific diagnosis, propagation gaps, and cohort lags. The framework is methodological rather than normative. It does not deny discrimination, exclusion, preference formation, structural inequality, social closure, or institutional bias. Instead, it argues that such mechanisms must be empirically located rather than inferred from endpoints alone. The paper concludes that endpoint analysis should be replaced or supplemented by candidate-pool reconstruction whenever institutional outcomes are used to make causal, normative, or policy claims. This working paper forms part of the Institutional Selection Framework research programme and provides its inferential foundation. It is connected to the Candidate Pool Proposition, the Career Path Dependency Index (CPDI), and the empirical working paper Cohort Selection and Institutional Outcomes.