Constitutional Epistemology

Modern governance architectures increasingly seek to replace trust in decisions with deterministic verification. Policies become executable, evidence becomes immutable, authority becomes machine-verifiable, and state transitions are admitted only after evaluation against explicit constitutional conditions. These developments establish an important foundation for governable autonomous systems. However, deterministic verification introduces a deeper question that cannot be resolved solely through execution: What establishes the legitimate standing of the knowledge, evidence, identity, authority, meaning, and constitutional rules upon which governance depends? A system may deterministically prove that a rule has been satisfied without establishing that the rule itself possesses legitimate authority. It may authenticate evidence without establishing that the evidence is entitled to participate in a particular constitutional decision. It may verify an authority credential without establishing that the authority represented by that credential is legitimately constituted. If these foundations ultimately depend upon assertions accepted by the system itself, deterministic governance risks formalizing belief rather than establishing constitutional legitimacy. This specification introduces Constitutional Epistemology as a formal discipline concerned with the epistemic foundations of governance. It defines epistemic claims, evidence objects, provenance, epistemic authority, standing, semantic references, constitutional references, and legitimacy dependencies. It establishes foundational principles addressing non-self-validation, evidence provenance, authority attribution, semantic integrity, domain-bounded standing, constitutional dependency, and governed constitutional mutation. The specification distinguishes computational verification from constitutional legitimacy and establishes requirements for evaluating the epistemic conditions under which information and authority may participate in governance. Its central principle is: No constitutional layer may be the sole source of evidence for the legitimacy of the conditions from which that layer derives its own authority. Constitutional Epistemology complements Executable Governance by addressing not only whether a transition satisfies its governing rules, but also whether the knowledge, evidence, authority, and constitutional premises used to reach that determination possess legitimate standing.