Auditable Admissibility: Ultimate Explanation and the Selection of Candidates

Recent grounding-theoretic work has produced increasingly rigorous certifications of rival ultimate explainers — necessary beings, autonomous essences, trans-categorial grounds, strongly well-founded structures — while the most developed comparative methodology for global theories, Oppy's virtue-theoretic naturalism, acknowledges the incompleteness of its own metric across multi-dimensional trade-offs. We argue that this acknowledged limit becomes acute precisely where the later grounding-theoretic candidates would have to be compared, and that the two literatures fail to mesh for a structural reason. Distinguishing three tasks — structural admissibility, candidate identification, and cross-framework selection — we show that every account examined here resolves, defers, asserts, or concedes the third task without an articulated account of the transition from intra-framework certification to cross-framework selection under conditions of policy disagreement. Our central claim: if cross-framework selection is to represent rather than merely dissolve disagreement, it requires an explicit admissibility policy whose commitments are publicly auditable and dialectically revisable; the accounts examined here leave that policy implicit, defer it, or defend it only within the framework whose candidates it licenses. The paper introduces the concept of an admissibility policy — the entry conditions, explanandum registry, and translation rules that constitute any comparison's space — and specifies the minimal representational architecture such a policy requires, including a detachable instrument, dual-ledger cost accounting, without prejudging how comparative judgment then falls.