Abstract

The cognitive-bias literature has produced a catalog of hundreds of named biases without a unifying structural account of why these biases and not others exist. This paper proposes that judgment executes four dimensional operations in a fixed sequence, recognition, contextualization, resolution, action, and that bias arises when the sequence fails to close in order. The five non-empty classes of dimensional judgment error follow from the dependency structure of the four dimensions. The signalless frame names the failure where contextualization operates without recognition having delivered the current signal. The frameless verdict names the failure where resolution operates without contextualization having delivered the frame. The unresolved commit names the failure where action operates without resolution having delivered the determinate state. The signalless verdict names the failure where resolution operates at the direct recognition-to-resolution path without recognition having delivered the targeted referent. The signalless commit names the catastrophic failure where action commits without recognition having admitted anything to commit on. A sixth potential class (contextualization-to-action without resolution) is structurally empty under the architecture's closure: every path from contextualization to action passes through resolution, and the architecture admits no clean contextualization-to-action shortcut. The architectural derivation of the dependency structure and the empty-cell closure lives in Stewart (2026e, 2026f, 2026g, 2026z). Each of the five non-empty classes corresponds to a named pattern in the cognitive-bias literature. Class 2-1, the signalless frame, captures persistent-state biases where the frame the resolution operates on carries content the present recognition admission did not deliver (anxious vigilance, ambient prior-state contamination of present judgment). Class 3-2, the frameless verdict, captures the canonical frame-mismatch biases (anchoring, framing, base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, hindsight, in-group bias, status-quo, planning fallacy, confirmation bias). Class 4-3, the unresolved commit, captures commit-before-resolve biases (belief perseverance, sunk-cost). Class 3-1, the signalless verdict, captures determination-without-referent biases (the conjunction fallacy in the Linda paradigm, the availability heuristic). Class 4-1, the signalless commit, captures confabulation and the strongest action-before-recognition failures. The taxonomy generates five predictions. Exhaustive classification commits every cross-dimensional bias in the cognitive psychology literature to one of the five non-empty classes, with the 4-2 cell structurally empty. Cross-task class identity predicts that biases sharing a dimensional class share an operational signature regardless of cognitive content and show correlated individual-differences profiles on tasks probing the same class. Dependency entailment predicts that subjects exhibiting a catastrophic failure of the full judgment cycle (Class 4-1) exhibit the full cycle's constituent dependency failures (Classes 2-1, 3-2, 4-3) at higher rates on related tasks, while subjects exhibiting a direct recognition-to-resolution failure (Class 3-1) do not exhibit the full cycle's interior failures at correlated rates because the direct dependency bypasses the full cycle's interior. The dependency-count severity gradient predicts that a catastrophic failure produces more severe judgment errors than its individual constituent dependency failures, with severity scaling by the count of dependencies that have failed. Structural intervention predicts that interventions re-establishing the missing prerequisite reduce a bias more reliably than interventions operating on the malformed downstream output. The architecture additionally forbids a sixth non-empty structural class, forbids the catastrophic failure (Class 4-1) without its constituent dependency failures (Classes 2-1, 3-2, 4-3), and forbids reversing the dependency direction at dimension 1, since recognition has no earlier dimension within the cycle to be displaced before. Reaction-time, neural-timing, and pharmacological-target signatures are derived in the Empirical Signatures and Pharmacological Targets sections as the loop-specific measurement apparatus the framework's predictions rest on, with the per-agent operational specifications handed to a dedicated pharmacological-predictions paper. The four-dimensional count is derived in this paper on judgment's own operands by removal (each dimension's removal breaks that dimension and no other, and no candidate fifth survives), with the substrate-scale derivation cited as a convergence witness reaching the same count by a route that shares none of judgment's operands (Stewart, 2026g). The neural-architecture instantiation and the path-algebra structure are inherited by citation (Stewart, 2026a, 2026e, 2026f, 2026z). The philosophical reframe of bias as architectural default rather than error against an imported standard is developed in *Cognitive Bias as Default Setting* (Stewart, 2026w). The methodological reframe of the canonical paradigms as probes of specific dimensions is developed in *Cognitive Bias Paradigms as Dimensional Probes* (Stewart, 2026aw). This paper develops the structural taxonomy and the empirical-signature predictions both companion papers depend on. **Keywords:** cognitive bias, heuristics and biases, hindsight bias, conjunction fallacy, availability heuristic, belief perseverance, sunk-cost, confabulation, anchoring, framing effect, base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error