{
  "id": "guilt.act-scoped",
  "term": "guilt",
  "sense": "act-scoped",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 19,
  "domain": "emotional",
  "style": "window",
  "definition": "a self-model reporting one past act as outside the window rather than the whole self, which is why it stops when the act is repaired.",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "self-model.reflexive",
      "self.personal",
      "model.representation",
      "report.information",
      "past.temporal",
      "act.deed",
      "outside.spatial",
      "window.range",
      "whole.complete",
      "stop.action",
      "repair.restore",
      "rather.comparative"
    ],
    "interaction": "The self-model scopes its negative report to a single completed act rather than to itself, so the report has a repair condition: fixing what the act broke terminates the signal.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "act-scoped negative report",
      "repair-terminated signal",
      "self-sparing accountability"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "A debt repaid with an apology can end the matter between friends in a way no apology ends humiliation.",
      "domain": "society"
    },
    {
      "text": "Restorative justice closes a case when the offender repairs what the act broke, which punishment alone does not do.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "A postmortem that names the faulty deploy and reverts it lets the engineer sleep, where a review of the engineer would not.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "shame.emotional",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "guilt scopes one act outside the window and ends on repair; shame reports the whole model near the wall, so repair of any single act does not end it"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "guilt",
    "guilty"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5:curated-selfmodel",
    "date": "2026-08-22",
    "confidence": 0.8,
    "sources": [
      "curated self-model expansion"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-guilt.act-scoped"
}