The Readout Condition: Distinguishability, Access, and Epistemic Warrant

Claims routinely distinguish more finely than the access sources invoked on their behalf. The central epistemic problem is not merely whether the resulting claim is true or justified, but whether each distinction in it is correctly attributed to the source, model, background evidence, relevance restriction, or decision rule that actually supplied the discrimination. This paper develops the Readout Condition as a necessary architecture for source-relative epistemic warrant. Its core is a threepart norm: existence (every claim-level distinction has an epistemic provenance path), attribution (a distinction credited to a source must be licensed by that source), and disclosure (essential augmentations must remain visible to audit). In the exact functional case, source attribution requires constancy on readout fibers and hence factorization through the readout. For non-transitive indiscriminability, the correct extension is pointwise: a claim token at an actual alternative is licensed only if its local indiscriminability neighbourhood lies inside the claim-value fiber, avoiding an illicit transitive closure. In stochastic settings, Blackwell garbling provides an access audit but cannot by itself detect assumption-driven silent lifts; a complementary identification ladder tracks the weakest augmentation layer at which a distinction becomes identified. The resulting typed provenance DAG supports a defeater-routing result: source-specific defeaters propagate exactly along the distinctions that depend on that source, while misattribution misroutes defeat and correction. Classical and pre-modern pressure tests from Dignāga–Dharmakı̄rti, Madhyamaka, Avicenna, and Suhrawardı̄ constrain the framework's neutrality. The proposed contribution is not a new factorization theorem, data-processing inequality, or general notion of provenance, but a unified distinction-level architecture linking access, identification, attribution, disclosure, and epistemic revision. Independent Scholar, Bangkok, Thailand. August 2026. Preprint — not peer reviewed. The Readout Condition is a standalone philosophical extraction from the public Readout Universe programme (github.com/morrocwi/readout_universe).