Epistemic Vulnerability: How Opacity Transforms Vulnerable Human Agency

This paper develops Epistemic Vulnerability as a central condition through which Opacity-based Epistemic Architecture can transform human agency. It argues that epistemic receptivity may enable reality-model capture, in which externally supplied categories, narratives, identities, legitimations, and interpretations shape the conditions from which judgment and action emerge. This process provides the basis for Noncoercive Tyranny, whereby impaired epistemic autonomy allows the Ruled Agent to experience resulting agency as apparently self-directed even while that agency extends Principal Agency. At its theoretical completion, the architecture becomes self-authenticating: the Ruled Agent not only inhabits the architected reality-model but legitimates, defends, and ultimately praises its architect.