Epistemic Status

Type: Modifier / Grammatical Condition (Epistemic)

Placement note: Placed in Division IV alongside Claim, Evidence, Interpretation, and Narrative. General institutional Status is the broader grammatical condition; epistemic status is a multidimensional profile independent of institutional disposition and operative condition.

Working Definition: Epistemic status is not a rank or a single value. It is a profile describing how a claim, item of evidence, interpretation, or narrative was derived, who or what produced it, how well it is grounded, how far it has been reviewed, and whether its warrant is under challenge. Institutional acceptance is tracked separately.

Formal Tag

EpistemicProfile(X) ::= {
  derivation:      Derivation,
  producer:        ProducerKind,
  grounding:       GroundingStatus,
  review_stage:    ReviewStage,
  warrant_status:  WarrantStatus
}

Derivation ::= "reported" | "observed" | "inferred" | "synthesized" | "not-applicable"
ProducerKind ::= "human" | "model" | "hybrid" | "instrument" | "collective" | "unknown"
GroundingStatus ::= "ungrounded" | "partially-grounded" | "source-grounded" | "not-assessed"
ReviewStage ::= "unexamined" | "provisional" | "under-review" | "reviewed"
WarrantStatus ::= "unchallenged" | "challenged"

accepted, rejected, retracted, superseded, and unresolved are not epistemic values. They belong to scoped institutional disposition or operative condition. Promotion is a recorded act and scope relation, not a global epistemic state.

What it attaches to

An epistemic profile may attach to:

• Claims, independently of institutional disposition
• Evidence, without collapsing provenance, authenticity, and support into one rank
• Interpretations, independently of whether an institution treats them as binding
• Narratives, independently of whether an institution adopts them as an official account

It does not attach to acts, roles, or commitments in the way general Status does — those carry institutional condition (valid, fulfilled, revoked), not groundedness. Nor does it describe institutional disposition itself: whether something has been accepted, rejected, promoted, retracted, superseded, or left unresolved is a third axis, owned and defined by the host concept.

Contrast

• groundedness ↔ institutional acceptance: how well-supported an item is vs. what an institution has done with it
• challenged ↔ contested: a challenge to warrant (WarrantStatus) vs. an unresolved institutional disposition (InstitutionalDisposition)
• producer ↔ grounding: a model-produced item may be source-grounded; a human-produced item may be ungrounded
• provenance ↔ warrant: traceability establishes where an item came from, not whether its source is reliable or supports the proposition
• reported ↔ observed: secondhand assertion vs. firsthand record

Examples

Ambiguity notes

1. The profile is deliberately multidimensional. Derivation, producer, grounding, review stage, and warrant condition may vary independently. They must not be compressed into a ladder.

2. Why contested moved. An epistemic challenge is WarrantStatus.challenged. InstitutionalDisposition.contested records institutional handling. A reviewed claim may be challenged, and an institution may continue to accept it while that challenge remains open.

3. Epistemic status is not acceptance. A claim marked reviewed or even source-grounded has not thereby been accepted — see the Contrast section above. Conflating the two lets a well-sourced but still-asserted claim get treated as settled, or lets a formally accepted claim's weak grounding go unexamined because "accepted" reads as if it also meant "well-grounded."

4. Substrate ADR 12 §3.3 is a different taxonomy under the same name. Substrate ADR 12 §3.3 uses epistemic_status as a six-value accession field for extracted source passages. That implementation-specific field is not identical to the general claim model defined here. Its values combine basis, review stage, and institutional disposition for the narrower purpose of accession. The shared name is historical; values must not be translated between the two taxonomies without an explicit mapping.

   Substrate epistemic_status (ADR 12 §3.3)	Encyclopedia equivalent	Notes
   unexamined	ReviewStage.unexamined	Direct match
   source_grounded	GroundingStatus.source-grounded	Direct match (underscore vs. hyphen)
   provisional	ReviewStage.provisional	Direct match
   contested	WarrantStatus.challenged	Maps to warrant, not institutional disposition
   reviewed	ReviewStage.reviewed	Direct match
   accepted	InstitutionalDisposition.accepted	Not part of the epistemic profile

Cross-References

• Claim — the primary concept carrying an epistemic profile; its institutional disposition and condition are defined there
• Evidence — evidence's tier is a provenance classification; its epistemic status is a separate, evaluative judgment about it
• Interpretation — interpretations carry epistemic profiles independently of their institutional force
• Narrative — narratives carry epistemic profiles independently of whether they are adopted as official accounts
• Provenance — without disclosed provenance, an item's epistemic status cannot be responsibly assessed
• Status — the broader institutional condition; epistemic status is the narrower groundedness axis, not a synonym
• Recognition — the act that may advance review status (e.g., provisional → reviewed) once a party with standing evaluates it; advancing claim status (e.g., to promoted) is a related but distinct act, defined in Claim