Transcendental Arguments Without the Bridge_Minimum Commitments and Dual Scope Control

Once a locally actual occurrence and one of its constitutive features are independently secured, that feature can constrain any candidate sufficient ground of the occurrence without either crossing from cognition to a mind-independent target or generalizing the feature across actuality. The Local Grounding Thesis states that if an occurrence is actual, a condition is genuinely constitutive of that occurrence, and a candidate is offered as sufficient for the occurrence as the occurrence it is, then the candidate must be adequate to that condition. Adequacy is minimal: the candidate may neither omit the condition nor merely redescribe it. The Grounding-Constraint Minimality Thesis fixes what that inference needs and nothing more. It requires no transfer from cognition to a mind-independent target, no universal instantiation of the condition, no anti-bruteness principle, no prohibition on same-level explanatory borrowing, no explanatory termination, and no ultimate ground. Two restrictions govern the result and are kept separate: a bridge restriction, which forbids transfer from a condition merely of cognition or representation to a mind-independent target without further warrant, and a locality restriction, which forbids expansion from a locally instantiated feature to unrestricted ontological scope without a separate scope premise. Minimal determinacy supplies a worked case. A performed assertion differs, as an occurrence, from there being no such occurrence, and, as an assertion, differs in content from its contradictory. Given that the assertion occurs, the local inference excludes any proposed sufficient ground on which that difference is denied or left unaccounted for. A cognitive framework likewise cannot be unilaterally explanatorily prior to minimal determinacy, since it must itself operate determinately to perform the constituting work. Excluding same-level borrowed explanation as well requires a further, explicitly stated anti-borrowing condition. Universal determinacy is not derived. The three-form taxonomy of epistemic-bridge, constitutive-disclosure, and grounding-constraint reasoning, and the bare grounding-constraint conditional, belong to earlier work; the contribution here is the minimum commitment set and exact scope of the surviving grounding form, which retains a nontrivial metaphysical use for transcendental analysis at the strength its premises support.