Architecture of Inquiry: Perceptual Availability, Organizational Compression, Inquiry Trajectory, Premature Coherence, and the Laundering Signal

A useful answer can leave the assumption behind a question unexamined. An accurate account can still leave a person with a narrow view of the problem. This paper names five conceptual mechanisms that locate where this happens and places them within one staged framework. Three are analytical targets and two are proposed failure patterns. Perceptual Availability concerns the accessibility of features and relations to recognition by a specified person under specified conditions. Organizational Compression concerns how that material is arranged into a manageable account. Premature Coherence is a failure within that process: one account gains authority before there is warrant to set aside consequential alternatives, and those alternatives stop being usable. The Laundering Signal is a failure of evidential scope: one claim is genuinely confirmed, and adjacent claims gain confidence or authority that the confirmation does not warrant. Inquiry Trajectory concerns the observable course of framing, questions, evidence standards, calibration, and judgment. The mechanisms apply to individual inquiry and to inquiry carried out through documents, tools, and institutional procedures, and they do not form a fixed cognitive sequence. The paper specifies an episode record that separates evidence, presentation, uptake, and outcome. It distinguishes individual uptake from collective commitment, and immediate support from retained capability. It sets out what to notice for each construct, including cases where closure, commitment, or a transfer of confidence is warranted. AI-assisted inquiry is one application. The contribution is conceptual: a set of distinctions and a way of looking, not a validated instrument or an exhaustive theory of cognition.