Conditional Truths and the Locale Framework: Map, Territory, and the Rendering Interface

Every physical statement is a conditional truth: it holds only within a locale --- a specified vacuum or symmetry sector, background geometry, medium, energy scale, or observer frame. This paper formalizes the resulting locale framework in four moves. First, a catalog of conditional truths (photon mass, spin, energy conservation, the second law, the electron's charge and mass, the vacuum) shows that the interesting physics lives at the seams where a rule fails to transfer. Second, the map-territory distinction: pedagogical maps fail at seams, and the ontological territory is the invariant relational structure that transfers across locales; ontic structural realism is engaged as a named imported premise, with its critics. Third, the rendering interface: an observer constrained to first-person observations inside a rendering experiences the metric of the image space, not the substrate; no finite set of such observations decides whether the substrate metric is Archimedean or ultrametric (the Monna-map underdetermination, generalized beyond the visual case); what cannot be decided can still be probed --- a rendering with structure leaks structure. Fourth, scale primitives: stripped of anthropocentric units, frequency is a recurrence count, the fine-structure constant is a ratio, and temperature is a derivative; by Ostrowski's theorem the Archimedean real line is one completion of the rationals among many. A falsifiability register (F1-F4) states the disconfirmation conditions; the strongest claim (C3: the substrate metric is not decidable from inside the interface) carries an open probe-design question.