The Coordination–Consensus Continuum: A Partially Observed Causal Theory of Attribution and Misrepresentation

This paper defines a coordination–consensus framework as a partially observed causal state-space rather than a single behavioral continuum. The real causal state in a window W is λ_W = (I_W, C_W, A_W): intentionality, control centralization, and participant agency. The observable temporal–structural signature Σ_W is a many-to-one trace of that state under environmental and presentation-mediated conditions. Deceptiveness is removed from the state: it is an audience-relative effect of an authored presentation, while attribution opacity is treated as a property of the observation channel, not evidence of guilt. The document separates a forensic certificate of trace-incompatible commission (M_cert) from the belief-level effect of deception, and treats misleading omission through three distinct objects — public error, disclosure duty, and culpability. The central claim is evidentiary: behavioral traces can motivate investigation and constrain the possible, but cannot by themselves establish attribution, misrepresentation, deceptive effect, or culpable manipulation. Six propositions make this precise: constructive non-identification, controlled false certification, the identified quotient, presentation-robust certification, a bridge inequality by which a fired certificate lower-bounds the deceptive effect for a credulous public, and the convexity that makes the certificate computable by a single convex program. A numerical companion numerically instantiates and regression-tests each proposition on a synthetic instance.