Epistemic Adversarial Pressure (EAP) and Adversarial Inference Regimes (AIR)

This preprint introduces Epistemic Adversarial Pressure (EAP) and Adversarial Inference Regimes (AIR), formalizing how incentive structures can systematically decouple apparent competence from genuine mastery. It shows that when rewards target observable signals rather than latent understanding, mastery inference becomes adversarial, producing structurally expected illusions of competence even in well-designed evaluation systems. The framework adds no new axioms and integrates directly into the Unified Mastery Meta-Theory as a regime-level characterization of inference failure under misaligned incentives.