C_7 Stress as a Diagnostic Primitive

This paper establishes stress as a diagnostic primitive for admissibility rather than a dynamical or causal quantity. Within a standing-conserving, fail-closed regime, stress is shown to function as a structural indicator of impending standing failure, not as a tunable parameter or explanatory resource. The argument proceeds by exhaustion: any attempt to reify stress as a generative mechanism, optimization signal, or repair handle collapses into inadmissibility. The paper is declarative and non-procedural, clarifying how diagnostic notions operate in a closed system without introducing measurement recipes, thresholds, or operational tests.