AIM Framework glossary
Immediacy Test
Canonical definition
The first limb of the Three-Test Battery: the identified Individuals must be literally and immediately blocking the Individual's access to a bodily need, right now. The terms are strict by design, and each blocks a route by which a diffuse deficit passes itself off as an acute one: temporal displacement, that they will eventually cause harm; metaphorical extension, that they are blocking symbolically; and speculative projection, that harm follows if the situation continues. What the Immediacy Test separates is acute Appetitive threat from diffuse felt deficit. A Grievance Belief that fails it is not thereby false, but it is not an emergency, and the response belongs to systemic analysis rather than to agent-targeting.
Explanation
The first test asks whether these people are standing between you and something your body needs, right now, in the literal sense. Not eventually, not symbolically, not if things carry on as they are. Most felt deficits fail this, and failing it does not mean the deficit is imaginary; it means the urgency attaching to it came from somewhere other than an emergency.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.
Derivation
Related terms
- Three-Test Battery
- Grievance Belief
- Grievance Gateway
- Mechanism Test
- Authorship Test
- Presumption Against Scapegoating
- Appetites