Circumscription and the Center: Determinacy, Objectivity, and Authored Choice

This paper develops a unified structural account of perceptual consciousness, awareness, objectivity, and free will. The core proposal is that any determinate episode instantiates an i-structure: a nested center–horizon organization generated by circumscriptions, understood as the reciprocal integration of differences into a whole. The “center” is a limit-like unity-role by which the whole is determinately one; the “horizon” is the structured field of co-implicated possibilities, constraints, background, and anticipations. I argue that the phenomenological center–horizon pattern can be treated, under a restricted transcendental move, as a condition on determinacy itself, provided one adopts a determinacy-for stance in a metaphysical sense: determinacy is inseparable from the space of possible determinations within systems of discrimination and interaction. Consciousness and awareness are then distinguished as emphases within i-structure: consciousness is stabilized thematic unity, whereas awareness is explicit openness of horizon and depth. Objectivity is characterized as communicatively stabilized approximation whose normativity lies in robustness under widening and deepening practices of determination. Finally, decision episodes are analyzed via identity- and affordance-determinacy, a crossing phase, and authored resolution. Compatibilists and libertarians share this structural target and differ primarily on the metaphysical reading of the openness in that shared structure.