SΔϕ-21 — Judgment as Intuition Authority Assignment: Minimal Axioms for Editable Decisions after No-Exit Intuition (v1.0)

This paper continues SΔϕ-20 by defining judgment (J) as the minimal operation that assigns authority to intuition markers produced by no-exit compression traces. While intuition provides candidate basins (“search is no longer worth it here”), judgment determines which basins become action-guiding by assigning priority weights or gating rules (authority A(I)). The core claim is that collapse is not primarily a failure of intelligence but a failure of editability: when authority assignments become non-revisable under finite cost, the system enters closure (over-authority). Conversely, when authority fails to stabilize, the system enters drift (under-authority). The paper provides a minimal axiomatic set for authority assignment, an Intuition–Authority–Decision (IAD) loop showing authority-debt accumulation, and diagnostic regimes for drift, closure, and editable judgment. The aim is not a psychological theory of decision-making but a substrate-agnostic structural account applicable to individuals, organizations, and AI systems where authority revision costs can exceed update budgets.