Why institutions keep answering the wrong question
A diagnostic framework for understanding how courts and public bodies actually reason
What follows is a diagnostic tool I developed with the aid of AI, which you can re-apply to your own interactions with courts and public authorities.
It categorises the type of reasoning being used in legal and institutional arguments, and shows how procedural language and rhetorical framing are often substituted for formal evidence and logically prior legal predicates.
You can think of this as an “executable essay”: save the framework, use it as a reference model in your own AI tools, and ask it to classify letters, judgments, or official correspondence. I’ve found the results both useful and revealing.
There is a familiar feeling that shows up again and again in disputes with institutions.
You raise what seems like an obvious question — basic, prior, even elementary — and the response you receive does not answer it. Instead, you are told about procedure, timelines, remedies, discretion, or “the proper forum”. The institution appears to be speaking a different language, or answering a different question entirely.
You’ve seen this when a court focuses on deadlines, appeals, or procedural posture while never answering whether a lawful decision was made at all.
This is often explained away as incompetence, evasion, or bad faith. But those explanations don’t really hold. The pattern is too consistent, too cross-institutional, and too stable over time.
There is a simpler explanation.
Institutions are not merely disagreeing with you. They are reasoning in a different mode.
Once you see that, a great deal of institutional behaviour — especially in courts and public law — becomes much easier to understand and predict.
What follows is a diagnostic framework for identifying what kind of work a legal or institutional proposition is actually doing, rather than being distracted by how “legal” it sounds.
The core problem: category confusion
Many disputes that look doctrinal on the surface are decided before doctrine is even reached.
That happens because different categories of reasoning are silently conflated. Statements that look decisive are treated as if they settle logically prior questions, when in fact they do not.
Ordinary legal prose does not mark these distinctions. This framework does.
It does not assume bad faith. It does not accuse institutions of corruption. It simply restores type discipline to legal reasoning.
The four (plus one) categories of institutional reasoning
Category F — Formal (legal-constructive)
Category F concerns propositions that must be true in law for anything else to follow.
These are existence-level questions.
Examples:
Did a tribunal exist?
Was a lawful order made?
Was a decision taken by an identifiable authority?
Did a power come into being at all?
These propositions are:
binary (true or false),
decisive,
non-curable,
and logically prior to procedure.
If an F-level predicate fails, downstream argument collapses with it.
This category is fragile — but if it holds, it ends the case.
Category PF — Procedural formalism
Procedural reasoning describes what follows if formal predicates are satisfied.
Examples:
“The correct remedy was appeal.”
“The claim is out of time.”
“This defect is cured by statute.”
Procedural reasoning is legitimate only if existence has already been established.
It becomes misleading when it is used to avoid determining whether anything existed in the first place.
Procedure cannot cure non-existence.
Category R — Rhetorical
Rhetorical propositions persuade, characterise, or frame, without establishing legal predicates.
Examples:
“This is a mere technicality.”
“No prejudice arose.”
“The claimant misunderstands the law.”
Rhetoric is not illegitimate. It becomes dangerous only when it is mistaken for proof.
Category RL — Rhetorical laundering
This is the critical category.
Rhetorical laundering occurs when rhetorical or assumed propositions are presented in the syntactic form of formal law, creating the appearance that an existence-level question has been resolved when it has not.
Examples:
“The court was clearly seised of jurisdiction.”
“Any defect was immaterial.”
“The magistrates were acting in their judicial capacity.”
These statements sound determinative. They rely on habit, authority, or consequence — not proof.
Rhetorical laundering is highly effective until named. Once exposed, it loses force very quickly.
Category I — Institutional / pragmatic override
Finally, there is an open, explicit mode that appears when resolving formal questions would threaten systemic stability.
Examples:
“Parliament cannot have intended this.”
“Thousands of cases would be affected.”
“The system could not function if…”
This is not covert. It is consequentialist. It explains why some formally defective arrangements persist.
Category I does not refute formal defects — it bypasses them.
How disputes are actually decided
Many public-law disputes (disputes with government bodies or courts) turn on a single formal predicate. But they are argued as if they were procedural management problems.
A common defensive sequence looks like this:
Avoid Category F (existence, constitution, identity)
Lead with Category PF (appeals, time limits, remedies)
Use Category RL to suggest F is settled
Treat resistance as procedural misuse
Invoke Category I if pressed too hard
This works only while the court remains in PF/RL mode.
The moment a court genuinely enters F-mode — asking what existed, who acted, and by what authority — rhetorical and procedural mass cease to help.
That is why institutions work so hard to prevent that descent.
I developed this framework by analysing repeated institutional responses across multiple domains, where outcomes were predictable long before doctrine was applied.
How to use the framework
You can apply this framework to almost any institutional interaction.
Step 1: Identify the decisive formal predicate
Ask:
What must exist in law for the other side’s position to be coherent at all?
Step 2: Classify propositions
For each assertion, ask:
Does this establish existence or attribution? → F
Does it describe consequences assuming existence? → PF
Does it persuade or characterise? → R
Does it assume authority without proof? → RL
Does it preserve the system despite defect? → I
Step 3: Watch for unmarked mode-switching
Especially:
“Did this exist?” → “Why didn’t you appeal?”
That switch is never accidental.
Step 4: Refuse downstream argument until upstream predicates are met
A disciplined response does not argue harder. It simply declines to move on.
What this framework explains
It explains:
why obvious questions go unanswered,
why procedural arguments feel strangely hollow,
why institutions sound confident even when proof is absent,
why outcomes are predictable before doctrine is applied.
It also explains why formally weak systems often survive: not because they are correct, but because resolving correctness would be institutionally expensive.
A final reassurance
This framework does not assume malice or conspiracy.
It explains how institutions reason under constraint, how they preserve continuity, and how legal categories quietly slide when existence questions are dangerous.
Once you see these modes, you cannot unsee them.
And once you can name them, institutional conversations become much easier to navigate — and much harder to manipulate.
One-paragraph takeaway
Formal arguments establish what exists;
procedural arguments describe what follows if it does;
rhetorical arguments manage acceptance without proof; and
institutional arguments preserve the system when proof is dangerous.
Most public-law disputes are decided by which mode the decision-maker adopts.
Try applying it the next time an institution answers a different question than the one you asked.