Agency Vocabulary: Working Definitions and Audit

Document status. Development Note and vocabulary audit. This document defines working meanings for agency-related labels already present in public UXR records. It does not yet authorize destructive renaming or retroactive taxonomy migration.

Why this audit exists. Public cases and Evaluations currently use eighteen distinct agency-related labels. Some are true agency dimensions, some are domain-specific expressions of agency, and some are related values, access conditions, or contestability concepts. UXR needs definitions before these labels can function reliably as comparative axes.

Non-exclusivity rule. Agency dimensions are not required to be mutually exclusive. Human agency is multi-dimensional and one system behavior can affect several dimensions at once. The goal is conceptual distinction and consistent use, not artificial exclusivity.

Informational Agency. A person's practical ability to obtain, understand, and use information needed to decide or act.

Decision Agency. A person's practical ability to make a meaningful choice before commitment, including access to material alternatives, consequences, and constraints.

Epistemic Agency. A person's practical ability to form, test, and revise beliefs about a system using sufficiently complete and accurate evidence, including awareness of material uncertainty or incompleteness.

Procedural Agency. A person's practical ability to enter, navigate, and complete a required process without avoidable dead ends, hidden dependencies, or unnecessary institutional knowledge.

Corrective Agency. A person's practical ability to challenge, correct, appeal, reverse, escalate, recover, or otherwise affect a system state when something is wrong or disputed.

Temporal Agency. A person's practical control over how their time is consumed, delayed, committed, interrupted, or recovered by a human-made system.

Cognitive Agency. A person's practical ability to understand and act without unnecessary cognitive burden, confusion, memory demands, or attention costs that materially impair choice or action.

Reliance Agency. A person's practical ability to rely on consequential system representations, statuses, promises, or instructions with reasonable correspondence between what the system communicates and what the system actually does.

Exit Agency. A person's practical ability to stop, cancel, leave, refuse continuation, or change pathways without disproportionate penalty or avoidable loss.

Practical Agency. A person's practical ability to translate intention into real-world effect through the system, rather than possessing only formal permission or theoretical options.

Financial Agency. A person's practical control over money, financial commitments, liquidity, timing, risk, and the ability to use or redirect financial resources.

Resource Agency. A person's practical control over material resources and their allocation, including resources consumed or displaced by system demands and compensatory workarounds.

Health Agency. A domain-specific expression of agency concerning a person's practical ability to pursue health objectives, obtain needed care, understand options, and act within healthcare systems. Its relationship to more general dimensions remains under audit.

Evidentiary Agency. A person's practical ability to create, preserve, access, submit, retrieve, and use evidence about a system interaction, including evidence needed for correction, accountability, or continuity.

Practical Access. Related concept under audit, not automatically an Agency Dimension. It describes whether a formally available service, benefit, provider, process, or remedy is operationally reachable and usable in practice.

Contestability. Related concept under audit. It describes whether a system's decisions, classifications, statuses, or outcomes can be challenged and meaningfully reconsidered. It strongly supports Corrective Agency but is not automatically identical to it.

Voice. Related concept under audit. It describes whether a person can express an objective, objection, account, or concern and have it enter the system's causal pathway rather than being ignored or procedurally erased.

Dignity. Related value under audit. Dignity concerns respectful treatment and recognition of personhood. It can be harmed alongside agency and can affect whether agency is practically usable, but UXR does not define dignity as merely another name for agency.

Intake rule. Use an existing defined label when it accurately fits. Do not invent a near-synonym because another phrase sounds better in one case. When no current label fits, flag a vocabulary proposal rather than silently creating a new comparative axis.

Migration rule. Existing public records retain their current labels during this audit. Any future merge, rename, category change, or migration should preserve historical meaning, record the mapping, and avoid implying that older case analysis was invalid merely because the vocabulary matured.

Next step. Stress-test these definitions across current and new cases, identify near-duplicates or composite dimensions, decide which labels become canonical comparative dimensions, and separately document values, enabling conditions, outcomes, and domain-specific expressions.