The Site of Paths: Local-to-Global Failure in Path-Generated Choice

Standard choice theory takes the domain of alternatives, the ranking of outcomes, the continuity of the evaluating subject, and the space over which a plan is defined as primitive data, available before deliberation begins. This paper collects four results, each developed independently and by different formal means, that treat these objects instead as generated along admissible paths-and that ask, in four different settings, whether the coarse, endpoint-level description available after the fact recovers the finer structure that produced it. Comparability between states is generated by witnessed routes, and an Arrow-type impossibility follows from the aggregation not of rankings but of witnesses. Accessibility to a future is generated by the weighted mass of practicable and conceivable paths toward it, and an endpoint can remain formally describable while becoming effectively unreachable when the bridge-worlds sustaining the path are suppressed. First-personal evaluative continuity across a transformative choice is generated by an admissible counterpart relation between situated evaluators, and can fail not on any single transition but only around a cycle of transitions, a failure invisible to any pairwise analysis and identified here as a genuinely cyclic monodromy obstruction, naturally expressible in the language of holonomy but not equivalent to the vanishing of a Čech H 1-class. The space of complete alternatives generated by a finite-scope, singularly selective plan is topologically thinclosed and nowhere dense-even when it has the cardinality of the continuum, and the minimum number of such plans needed to exhaust the space of alternatives is a cardinal characteristic of the continuum, independent of the standard axioms of set theory. We show that these four failures of local-to-global reconstruction do not reduce to a single mathematical phenomenon dressed in four notations: they occupy genuinely different registers-cyclic monodromy, connectivity of a witness nerve, persistence along a closure filtration, and cardinal covering of a meagre ideal-on the same underlying site of admissible paths. We state this asymmetry as a result rather than concealing it, and identify the transport movement as the one in which the new formal apparatus is not descriptive but generative: it proves a theorem the arc-local theory cannot state.