Certification & Credential Collapse Theory (CCCT)

This preprint introduces Certification & Credential Collapse Theory (CCCT), a meta-theoretical account of why credentialing systems are structurally incapable of guaranteeing mastery. CCCT shows that, independent of implementation quality, credentials fail to satisfy three necessary conditions for mastery inference—identifiability, validity beyond constrained test conditions, and longitudinal persistence—leading to systematic epistemic limits. The theory derives institutional corollaries explaining credential inflation, proxy drift, and the substitution of administrative legibility for epistemic validity, while clarifying that credentials retain procedural and signaling utility despite lacking mastery-guaranteeing authority.