The Transmission of Co-Experience Knowledge Interpretive Power, Epistemic Standing, and Responsibility

Transcript

Abstract

Knowledge generated through shared practice, testimony, consultation, oral history, collaborative research, and institutional inquiry acquires portability through selective transformations. A relation gives rise to an account; an account becomes a trace; a trace enters interpretation, circulation, use, preservation, and possible regeneration. These transitions can preserve a declared content feature while changing participant linkage, interpretive authority, contestability, burdens, benefits, and future generative conditions. This position paper develops a co-experience-specific account of that problem. Its central philosophical claim is that transmission carries at least four independent continuity dimensions: target-relative object continuity, participant and provenance linkage, interpretive-authority continuity, and generative-condition continuity. The paper proposes transmission justice as a local diagnostic for governing these dimensions across stages. A substantial literature discussion places the proposal beside epistemologies of testimony, epistemic injustice, silencing, situated knowledge, decolonizing methodology, boundary objects, classification infrastructure, historical and archival power, oral-history ethics, Indigenous data sovereignty, structural responsibility, and moral repair. The formal component types the trajectory, makes fidelity target-indexed, represents plural standing and stage-specific agency, separates eight normative and responsibility statuses, and proves a limited trace-only non-recovery result. Four constructed cases examine whether stage localization changes evidence demands or remedies. The framework remains provisional and earns retention through comparative and practical discrimination.

Keywords: co-experience knowledge; transmission; epistemic injustice; interpretive power; epistemic standing; archives; structural responsibility; repair

Discussion Paper Note

This paper is a preliminary discussion paper intended to share an evolving idea and invite further dialogue, criticism, revision, and independent development.

The paper develops a researcher-origin analysis of co-experience transmission and uses transmission justice as a local organizing term. The analysis enters conversation with established work on testimony, epistemic injustice, silencing, epistemic oppression, situated knowledge, representation, structural responsibility, collective responsibility, classification, archival power, oral history, decolonizing methodologies, Indigenous data sovereignty, and moral repair. Similar or more complete formulations may appear in other intellectual, cultural, professional, or disciplinary traditions. The literature review records a bounded comparative pass and leaves systematic genealogy and originality assessment open.

The author accepts responsibility for the definitions, distinctions, formal constructions, research design, argument, citations, and conclusions presented here. Any errors of interpretation, formulation, calculation, or attribution remain the author’s responsibility. Dialogue-assisted drafting preserves sole human authorship and responsibility.

The arguments should be understood as provisional and historically situated. Readers are encouraged to question, revise, extend, reinterpret, or independently develop the ideas. Where appropriate, acknowledgment of this paper as one point of encounter in the development of related work is appreciated.

Responsible Use and Rights Reservation

The author encourages good-faith discussion, criticism, independent development, and responsible use of the knowledge presented in this work. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law concerning unlawful conduct, harmful or abusive exploitation, improper commercial appropriation, infringement of applicable intellectual-property or other legal rights, and conduct contrary to applicable national, regional, or international law.

This reservation preserves the ability to respond to misuse and harmful appropriation while supporting legitimate academic inquiry, criticism, independent reasoning, and further development of related ideas.

Notices

Status. This working draft is circulated for discussion. Its concepts, statement numbers, formal constructions, cases, and conclusions remain revisable.

Licence. This work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), subject to the rights reservation stated on the preceding page.

Statement on the use of language models. Drafting, literature discovery, formal criticism, and LaTeX assistance were conducted in dialogue with OpenAI Codex. The author selected the research question, accepted or rejected proposed formulations, checked the cited references, and bears sole responsibility for the definitions, taxonomy, formal constructions, arguments, conclusions, and remaining errors.

Related research programme. This paper is the second study in an integrated series on co-experience knowledge, transmission, and injustice. The first develops co-experience knowledge, symbolization, continuity, and regeneration (Huang 2026). The present paper studies how co-experience knowledge changes as it travels and how those changes redistribute epistemic positions. Planned studies address language, culture, institutional translation, political economy, and AI mediation under separate evidence requirements.

Suggested citation. Huang, W. The Transmission of Co-Experience Knowledge: Interpretive Power, Epistemic Standing, and Responsibility. Working draft, 2026.

Introduction

This section defines the paper’s object, motivates its normative problem, states its position and contribution boundary, and presents the argumentative architecture. The method combines philosophical reconstruction, a bounded and verified literature comparison, formal definitions and countermodels, and constructed cases designed to expose failures in diagnosis and remedy.

Knowledge can arise in one relation and acquire public force through another. A narrator and interviewer form an oral-history account; an editor selects passages; an archive describes and governs the record; a scholar interprets it; an institution circulates or uses the interpretation; later communities encounter its consequences. A consultation follows a related path from situated testimony to a codebook, report, policy category, administrative decision, and changed conditions of participation. Collaborative research can pass from field relations through notes, datasets, publications, teaching, institutional memory, and successor inquiry. Each route begins with relations among persons, practices, histories, concepts, and material conditions. Each route also acquires portability through selective form.

The central difficulty arises from the combination of relational origin and selective portability. A portable trace can preserve important content and extend its reach. The same trace can detach statements from their formative relations, transfer interpretive control, conceal omissions, stabilize a classification, or weaken the conditions under which future participants could understand, revise, and regenerate the knowledge. Greater textual fidelity can coexist with weaker participant linkage. Strong attribution can coexist with concentrated authority. Durable preservation can coexist with declining living capacity. The phrase successful transmission therefore needs a declared target and a plural account of continuity.

The paper advances four connected philosophical theses. First, some knowledge depends partly on a relational configuration; co-experience contributes to its formation without settling its eventual bearer or ownership. Second, transmission proceeds through transformations and re-realizations among heterogeneous objects. Third, target-relative object continuity, participant and provenance linkage, interpretive-authority continuity, and generative-condition continuity vary independently. Fourth, justice concerns the distribution of standing, control, burden, benefit, consequence, and repair across these transformations. The paper uses transmission justice as a local diagnostic for this fourth task.

Established literatures constrain every part of the proposal. Philosophical work on testimony examines dependence on others, trust, authority, and the transmission of knowledge (Coady 1994; McMyler 2011). Epistemic-injustice scholarship analyses credibility, intelligibility, silencing, oppression, exploitation, resistance, and institutional structure (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011, 2014; Pohlhaus 2012; Medina 2013; Berenstain 2016; Anderson 2012). Situated and decolonial approaches foreground positionality, representation, research history, and self-determination (Haraway 1988; Alcoff 1991–1992; Smith 2023). Science and technology studies shows how boundary objects and classification infrastructure coordinate heterogeneous worlds while carrying consequential standards (Star and Griesemer 1989; Bowker and Star 1999). Historical and archival scholarship locates power in source production, selection, description, preservation, communication, and historical narrative (Trouillot 1995; Schwartz and Cook 2002; Caswell and Cifor 2016). Oral-history guidance and Indigenous data governance provide practice frameworks for collaboration, authority, responsibility, ethics, access, and restriction (Oral History Association 2018; Carroll et al. 2020; Kukutai and Taylor 2016; Society of American Archivists 2025). Structural responsibility and moral repair expand the temporal and relational scope of response (Young 2011; Isaacs 2011; Walker 2006).

The proposed contribution is architectural and conditional. It joins relational source formation to a typed sequence of selection, symbolization, interpretation, circulation, use, consequence, preservation, and repair. It makes four continuity dimensions explicit, treats epistemic standing as plural, records the bridge from evidence to each normative judgment, separates eight status and responsibility registers, and links remedies to mechanism-bearing stages. Its strongest formal result is modest: a later operation using only a trace cannot identify a target distinction that an earlier many-to-one map erased. Its main philosophical contribution lies in showing why informational preservation, relational continuation, authority, and generative capacity require distinct arguments.

The contribution boundary is demanding. The paper presents a revisable synthesis and a diagnostic vocabulary. Established approaches receive priority wherever they already provide equal or stronger discrimination. The proposed framework earns a distinct role only when stage typing or plural continuity changes a warranted conclusion about evidence, standing, responsibility, or remedy. Archive, oral-history, and Indigenous-data practices retain their own institutional and community authority. Jurisdiction-specific legal judgments require a separate legal study.

The manuscript places philosophical and domain analysis around a bounded formal core. Section 2 reconstructs the transmission predicament and the four forms of continuity. Section 3 develops the literature comparison. Section 4 presents the paper’s normative argument. Sections 5–7 state the model, derivations, and limits. Section 8 tests the distinctions through four cases. Sections 9 and 10 state objections and research obligations. Section 11 gives the resulting conditional position.

Co-Experience and the Transmission Predicament

This section reconstructs the philosophical object before assigning any normative status. It develops relational source formation, transmission as transformation, four dimensions of continuity, and the predicament created when portability and relational continuation diverge.

Relational Source Formation

This subsection identifies the condition that makes the paper specific to co-experience. The relevant source is a configuration whose organization contributes to what can be known, expressed, tested, or learned.

Definition 1 (Co-experience configuration). A co-experience configuration is a historically situated arrangement of participants, interactions, practices, contrasts, expectations, material conditions, and inherited concepts through which an epistemic object or capacity becomes available.

The definition permits different strengths of dependence. A conversation may supply evidence that one participant later reports individually. A long collaborative practice may make distinctions available only through reciprocal correction and shared competence. A community may sustain categories, narratives, and interpretive habits across generations. A research team may generate an observation through distributed instruments, trust, technique, and disagreement. The phrase co-experience knowledge applies when some feature of the resulting knowledge depends on this organization.

Relational dependence leaves bearer attribution open. A participant can know something that arose through a relation. A group can maintain a distributed competence. A text can carry a symbolic trace to later readers. These possibilities concern distinct questions: genesis, present realization, attribution, and transmission. The first paper in this series develops that separation in detail (Huang 2026). The present analysis begins after a case supplies a plausible relational-dependence claim.

The source relation also has internal structure. Participants can enter with unequal security, vocabulary, social standing, memory, or institutional power. Conflict and misunderstanding can contribute to formation. Co-experience therefore accommodates conflict and moral ambiguity. Its importance lies in causal and constitutive contribution. A later justice analysis must examine the actual relation, including exclusions and asymmetries within it.

Claim 2 (Relational-origin thesis). When a feature of knowledge depends on the organization of a co-experience configuration, an adequate transmission account includes the source relations and conditions that made that feature available.

The claim establishes a relevance condition. Ownership, veto, and comprehensive authority each require further grounds. The analyst must identify the dependent feature and the relation that supports it.

Transformation and Re-Realization

This subsection develops the paper’s account of transmission. The central distinction separates movement of a stable token from the production of successor objects under new media, interpreters, purposes, and institutions.

An oral encounter becomes an audio recording, transcript, catalogue entry, quotation, historical interpretation, educational resource, or training corpus. A consultation becomes notes, codes, counts, themes, recommendations, administrative categories, and policy effects. A practical competence becomes instruction, demonstration, correction, credential, and successor practice. Each operation preserves some relations and introduces others. A transcript gains persistence and searchability while losing gesture, timing, audience relation, and unrecorded context. A summary gains comparability while concentrating classification power. An archive extends temporal reach while governing description, access, and future reinterpretation.

Definition 3 (Co-experience transmission). Co-experience transmission is the historically situated transformation and re-realization of relationally formed knowledge through selection, symbolization, interpretation, circulation, use, preservation, and possible regeneration under changed bearers and conditions.

The term transmission therefore names a trajectory of typed changes. It avoids the image of an intact substance passing through a neutral channel. Some transitions primarily carry a trace; others reorganize authority, audience, practical competence, or future possibility. The successor can preserve a valuable feature and generate new knowledge. It can also stabilize a distortion or close a path of revision.

Two distinctions follow. First, successful transportation of a record differs from successful continuation of the knowledge relation. Second, transformation has context-dependent normative valence. Selection can protect privacy, create clarity, or enable access. Selection can also erase a minority account or hide an institutional failure. Symbolization can preserve knowledge and create new interpretive resources. It can also impose categories beyond participant contest or revision. Judgment enters through the target, history, standing relations, consequences, and governing norm.

Plural Continuity

This subsection separates four dimensions often compressed into fidelity or preservation. Table [tab:continuities] defines the dimensions and shows characteristic divergence.

@p0.17p0.23Y Y@ Dimension & Assessment target & Characteristic evidence & Characteristic divergence
Object continuity & declared content, distinction, competence, or invariant & source–trace comparison, target definition, error record & accurate content with erased provenance
Participant linkage & contributors, source relations, and transformation history & attribution, consent scope, edit history, provenance & attribution with weak voice or reply
Authority continuity & scoped interpretation, contestation, mandate, and revision & decision rules, uptake, reasons, appeals, review & participant credit with concentrated control
Generative-condition continuity & future competent participation and successor formation & living practice, teaching, resources, access, successor activity & durable record with capability decay

Object continuity concerns preservation of a declared feature. The target can be a proposition, distinction, uncertainty, procedure, competence, narrative relation, or generative invariant. Participant linkage concerns traceable relations among the successor object, contributors, source encounter, and transformation history. Authority continuity concerns the distribution and scope of interpretation, contestation, revision, and use. Generative-condition continuity concerns capacities and conditions through which future participants can competently enact, transform, and transmit the knowledge.

The rows in Table [tab:continuities] vary independently. An anonymized transcript can preserve a declared proposition while removing participant linkage. A fully attributed record can give former participants little influence over description or use. A governed archive can preserve content, provenance, and review paths while the living practice and training ecology disappear. A successor community can sustain a capacity by revising inherited formulations. These cases support a plural-continuity thesis.

Claim 4 (Plural-continuity thesis). Target-relative object continuity, participant and provenance linkage, interpretive-authority continuity, and generative-condition continuity require separate assessment. Evidence for one dimension leaves the other dimensions open.

This thesis also limits the vocabulary of fidelity. A trace may be faithful to an event sequence and weak with respect to uncertainty. It may preserve wording and lose pragmatic force. It may preserve a conclusion and hide the disagreement that gave the conclusion its warrant. A fidelity judgment therefore declares its target, comparison procedure, evidence, and tolerance for loss.

Selective Portability

This subsection derives the transmission predicament from the preceding distinctions. The problem arises because portability requires selection while later accountability often requires access to what selection displaced.

Every portable representation has finite form. Recording selects a sensory range, position, duration, and format. Transcription selects conventions. Coding selects units and categories. Publication selects an audience and genre. Preservation selects objects, metadata, media, retention periods, and access rules. The selected form enables movement beyond the source encounter. It also establishes a new environment of visibility and invisibility.

The predicament has three parts. First, continuation often requires transformation because a lived configuration cannot be reproduced as a complete object. Second, transformation redistributes epistemic positions because editors, classifiers, archivists, platforms, experts, and institutions gain stage-specific powers. Third, later correction depends on residual channels such as provenance, source access, participant reply, alternative records, or living practice. A transmission can therefore expand access and contract corrigibility at the same time.

Trouillot’s account of power in historical production and Schwartz and Cook’s analysis of archives as active sites of appraisal, description, preservation, and communication provide major antecedents for this predicament (Trouillot 1995; Schwartz and Cook 2002). Bowker and Star show how categories and standards become consequential infrastructure (Bowker and Star 1999). These traditions already place power inside practices of recording and ordering. The present proposal connects their insight to relational source formation and to a four-dimensional continuity analysis.

Claim 5 (Transmission predicament). Co-experience knowledge gains extended reach through selective form, while the same selection can change the evidence, relations, authority, and capacities required for future interpretation and repair.

The predicament calls for plural judgment under constraints. Complete provenance can endanger vulnerable participants. Broad access can violate confidentiality or culturally governed restriction. Permanent preservation can freeze an injurious category. Continuous participant control can conflict with internal dissent, evidence, public accountability, and legitimate institutional roles. The philosophical task is therefore to identify relevant relations and justify their governance under domain conditions.

Scope of the Co-Experience Category

This subsection limits the paper’s central term. It distinguishes co-experience transmission from generic communication and identifies the evidence needed for application.

An ordinary report can enter the stage model. Its classification as co-experience knowledge requires an additional showing: some target feature arose through a relational configuration. The relevant dependence can concern content, practical discrimination, warrant, confidence, intelligibility, or generative capacity. Mere co-presence provides weak evidence. Repeated interaction, reciprocal correction, complementary access, shared practice, counterfactual dependence, and distinctive joint outputs provide stronger evidence.

The category also permits degrees and mixtures. A field report can combine individually observed facts, team-generated interpretations, inherited concepts, and institutionally imposed categories. The analysis should decompose these sources where evidence allows. Co-experience functions as a research object whose boundaries remain revisable through cases. It gains value through explanatory discrimination, especially where a generic sender–message–receiver model misses relational genesis or future regenerative conditions.

Philosophical and Domain Genealogies

This section locates the proposal within verified antecedent literatures and practice traditions. It proceeds from testimony and epistemic injustice through representation, translation, classification, archives, community governance, responsibility, and repair. Table [tab:literature] records the comparative functions and the remaining burden placed on the paper.

@p0.20Y Y@ Literature cluster & Established contribution used here & Specific comparative task
Testimony and authority & epistemic dependence, trust, speaker–audience responsibility, chains of transmission & extend analysis to relational genesis and multi-stage transformation
Epistemic injustice and oppression & credibility, intelligibility, silence, exclusion, labor, resistance, institutions & localize mechanisms while preserving established normative categories
Situated and decolonial inquiry & partial perspective, speaking position, research history, agenda, self-determination & type standing, mandate, source relation, and later institutional use
Boundary objects and classification & coordination across heterogeneous worlds, standards, categories, infrastructure & distinguish productive translation from authority and continuity claims
History and archival power & source production, silences, appraisal, description, memory, identity, access & trace power across source, record, archive, narrative, and successor conditions
Oral history and data sovereignty & collaboration, ongoing participation, authority to control, responsibility, ethics, restriction & preserve domain and community authority within stage analysis
Responsibility and moral repair & structural implication, collective agency, answerability, damaged relations, amends & separate actor blame, institutional directions, and plural repair targets

Testimony, Trust, and Epistemic Dependence

This subsection establishes the closest philosophical tradition concerning knowledge received through others. It also marks the difference between testimonial transfer and the transmission of knowledge formed through co-experience.

Coady’s study of testimony emphasizes the fundamental role of reliance on others in the acquisition and sustenance of knowledge and examines chains of testimonial transmission (Coady 1994). McMyler connects testimony with trust, authority, second-personal reasons, and a distribution of epistemic responsibility between speaker and audience (McMyler 2011). These works displace an individualistic picture in which each knower reconstructs all warrant from impersonal evidence.

The present problem includes testimony and adds two complications. The first concerns genesis. A speaker may report knowledge that already belongs to the speaker, while co-experience knowledge can arise partly through interaction among several participants and conditions. The second concerns transformation. The source account can pass through editors, categories, archives, platforms, experts, and institutions before reaching the consequential audience. Speaker sincerity and audience trust address important relations inside this route; selection, inscription, classification, preservation, and institutional use introduce further relations.

Testimony also clarifies a limit of the stage model. A report can carry a second-personal relation whose normative significance exceeds informational similarity. A perfectly accurate transcription can change the speaker–hearer relation when it enters an archive or administrative process. The paper’s participant-linkage and authority dimensions preserve a place for this relational change.

Epistemic Injustice, Silence, and Exploitation

This subsection reviews the normative vocabulary most directly concerned with unequal epistemic position. The literature supplies substantive concepts that the proposed stage model must preserve and sharpen through localization.

Fricker distinguishes testimonial injustice, involving prejudicial credibility assessment, and hermeneutical injustice, involving unfair disadvantage in making social experience intelligible (Fricker 2007). The wider field addresses power, liberatory epistemologies, social structures, and applied domains (Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus 2017). A co-experience trajectory can locate credibility practices at interpretation and uptake while locating the availability of interpretive resources across formation, selection, symbolization, and circulation. Such localization adds value when it changes the evidence or remedy.

Dotson analyses epistemic violence in linguistic exchanges through pernicious ignorance and later develops an account of persistent epistemic exclusion across levels of epistemic oppression (Dotson 2011, 2014). Pohlhaus joins situatedness and interdependence in an account of willful hermeneutical ignorance (Pohlhaus 2012). Medina develops epistemic resistance through friction, imagination, complicity, and shared responsibility (Medina 2013). These accounts already connect position, exchange, structure, and resistance. The proposed framework therefore treats their concepts as antecedent diagnoses and asks a narrower question: which operation carries or reproduces the diagnosed mechanism?

Berenstain’s account of epistemic exploitation shows that calls for explanation and inclusion can impose coerced, unrecognized, uncompensated, and taxing labor on marginalized persons (Berenstain 2016). This creates a critical test for participatory remedies. Additional testimony can increase burdens while selection, interpretation, and use remain concentrated elsewhere. Fürst’s staged account of moving from experiential and community-relational concepts toward public concepts supplies a constructive comparison for concept development across transitions (Fürst 2024). Together, these works support attention to both exclusion from participation and exploitation through participation.

Situated Representation and Decolonizing Methodology

This subsection develops the relation between epistemic position, representation, and the history of inquiry. Its role is to constrain abstract assignments of standing and authority.

Haraway’s situated-knowledge argument gives a major account of embodied and accountable partial perspective (Haraway 1988). Alcoff examines the position and discursive effects involved in speaking for others (Alcoff 1991–1992). Smith locates research practices within imperial histories and Indigenous struggles to reclaim research agendas, methods, and ways of knowing (Smith 2023). These contributions support three requirements for a transmission analysis: identify the position from which a representation arises, trace the effects of its circulation, and situate institutional roles within historical power.

Situatedness supports plural appraisal and scoped authorization. Participants can disagree; communities can contain hierarchies; expertise can reveal causal relations that immediate experience leaves obscure; external criticism can support liberation or reproduce appropriation. Experiential position, source participation, expertise, affectedness, mandate, custody, and institutional role each carry characteristic claims and characteristic limits.

Decolonizing methodology also sets a contribution boundary. A generic vector cannot translate Indigenous self-determination into one stakeholder weight. Research involving a community’s knowledge, data, or cultural materials requires the relevant governance authority, protocol, history, and relation. The formalism can record these elements after they are established; it cannot confer them.

Translation, Boundary Objects, and Classification

This subsection places symbolization and cross-world coordination within science and technology studies. The comparison separates compatibility across perspectives from continuity of content, relation, or authority.

Star and Griesemer analyse cooperation among heterogeneous social worlds through translation, standardized methods, and boundary objects that remain adaptable to local needs while maintaining a common identity across sites (Star and Griesemer 1989). This approach is highly relevant to co-experience transmission. A consultation category, field specimen, shared map, or archival description can coordinate actors who hold different purposes and interpretations. Coordination success can coexist with asymmetry in who defines the common form.

Bowker and Star examine classifications and standards as information infrastructure whose categories shape worldviews, interaction, advantage, and suffering (Bowker and Star 1999). Classification therefore belongs within the symbolization and use stages. A codebook transforms varied accounts into comparable units. The transformation can support public reasoning, reveal patterns, and create administrative capacity. It can also hide residual cases, stabilize a dominant ontology, and make revision costly.

The transmission framework draws two lessons. First, a common artifact can enable cooperation without producing shared interpretation. Second, a successful classification can remain normatively contestable through its origin, exclusions, consequences, and governance. Boundary-object robustness, target fidelity, participant linkage, authority continuity, and generative capacity should therefore receive separate assessments.

Historical Production and Archival Power

This subsection extends the trajectory across time. It examines how sources, archives, descriptions, narratives, and absences participate in the production of historical knowledge.

Trouillot analyses power in the making and recording of history and foregrounds the production of silences (Trouillot 1995). Schwartz and Cook describe archives and archivists as active participants in record-system design, appraisal, selection, description, preservation, communication, memory, and identity (Schwartz and Cook 2002). Their account directly challenges an image of the archive as a passive store. Caswell and Cifor develop a relational feminist ethics of radical empathy linking archivists to creators, subjects, users, and communities (Caswell and Cifor 2016).

These works deepen the stage model in two ways. Silence can arise at several moments and can accumulate. A source can remain unrecorded; a record can remain unselected; selected material can receive an obscuring description; a discoverable record can remain unused; a public narrative can marginalize available evidence. Repair at one stage may leave earlier or later mechanisms intact. Archival power also concerns positive formation: collection, description, preservation, and access create conditions for future questions and identities.

The co-experience perspective adds a further continuity issue. A record can survive while the relations needed to interpret or regenerate its knowledge disappear. Provenance, context, living custodianship, language competence, and revision paths can therefore matter alongside physical persistence. This claim requires careful governance because condition-rich records can expose vulnerable participants or restricted knowledge.

Oral History and Indigenous Data Sovereignty

This subsection examines practice frameworks in which relational formation and downstream governance are already explicit. These frameworks provide more than illustrations; they constrain the paper’s general categories.

The Oral History Association treats oral history as a dynamic and collaborative relationship and emphasizes preparation, informed participation, ethical practice, power, archiving, and responsibilities across the project lifecycle (Oral History Association 2018). The Society of American Archivists joins access and transparency with accountability, trust, source-community relations, privacy, and culturally sensitive restriction (Society of American Archivists 2025). These principles show that formation, record, custody, access, and later use already carry differentiated responsibilities.

The CARE Principles organize Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics across Indigenous data governance (Carroll et al. 2020). Kukutai and Taylor’s volume develops Indigenous data sovereignty through rights and interests in the collection, ownership, and application of data and through self-determination (Kukutai and Taylor 2016). The paper treats these as a domain-specific political and epistemic tradition. Indigenous governance enters an application through its own authority and history. The general model can help locate operations and evidence after that authority is recognized.

These practice traditions also reveal tension among values. Access, privacy, continuity, consent, cultural restriction, public accountability, and long-term preservation can pull in different directions. A defensible analysis records the governing authority, object, purpose, audience, duration, review procedure, and changing conditions.

Structural Responsibility and Relational Repair

This subsection connects transmission failures to differentiated responsibilities and repair. The comparison separates actor culpability, institutional answerability, forward-looking capacity, and reconstruction of damaged relations.

Young’s social-connection model develops a forward-looking political responsibility for structural injustice among agents connected through social processes (Young 2011). Medina similarly connects epistemic injustice with shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions (Medina 2013). Isaacs analyses individual and collective levels of moral responsibility and their relations (Isaacs 2011). These works support separate registers for actor culpability, backward-looking institutional answerability, and forward-looking institutional responsibility.

Walker’s account of moral repair centres damaged moral relations, victims’ claims, trust, acknowledgment, amends, and the restoration or recreation of workable normative expectations (Walker 2006). This relational orientation matters because correction of a record can leave damaged standing, trust, procedure, or capacity in place. Co-experience transmission therefore admits several repair objects: the trace, the interpretation, the public attribution, the governing procedure, the material consequence, and the conditions for future co-experience.

Repair responsibility can arise through causal contribution, entrusted role, present power, benefit, social connection, public mandate, unique capacity, or a combination. These grounds can distribute differently across actors and institutions. A forward-looking duty can become stronger after new knowledge or capacity appears even when historical culpability remains unresolved.

Comparative Contribution Boundary

This subsection states the literature-facing test for retaining the proposal. The test concerns explanatory and practical discrimination, with terminological priority left open.

Proposition 6 (Stage-discrimination condition). The proposed framework earns a distinct research role in a case when typed stages, plural continuity, or explicit bridge records change at least one warranted conclusion concerning mechanism, evidence, standing, responsibility, or remedy relative to a strong application of established concepts.

The condition supplies a demanding gate. Generic descriptions of voice, exclusion, appropriation, or fairness can identify an area of concern. Established concepts can already deliver a complete diagnosis in many cases. A co-experience transmission analysis should then contract into those concepts. A distinct role appears when relational genesis, stage-specific power, target-indexed fidelity, plural continuity, or future generative conditions reveal a difference that affects inquiry or response. Table [tab:literature] makes this comparative burden visible.

Normative Architecture for Co-Experience Transmission

This section develops the paper’s positive normative proposal. It defines transmission justice as a local diagnostic, distinguishes plural forms of standing, derives the separation between participation and authority, requires explicit normative bridges, and identifies several objects of repair.

Local Diagnostic and Normative Sources

This subsection defines the organizing term and states its dependence on substantive normative theories. The definition provides a grammar for judgment while domain theories supply its standards.

Definition 7 (Transmission justice for co-experience). Transmission justice is the stage-sensitive assessment and governance of co-experience knowledge through defensible distributions of epistemic standing, control, burden, benefit, consequence, and repair capacity. A complete assessment identifies the operative transformation, epistemic object, affected parties, forms of standing, normative grounds, evidence, defeaters, and response relations.

The definition has three levels. The descriptive level identifies what changed, who acted, and which powers moved. The normative level identifies the claim, duty, virtue, right, relation, history, distribution, or structural condition that grounds evaluation. The remedial level identifies the object and mechanism a response should alter. Separation among these levels preserves the argument connecting them.

Transmission justice operates through plural normative sources. Egalitarian, relational, democratic, decolonial, rights-based, care-based, virtue-based, structural, and professional approaches can support different judgments. A public consultation may turn on procedural fairness and democratic mandate. An oral-history archive may turn on consent, trust, custody, source-community relation, and future use. Indigenous data may turn on self-determination and authority to control. A recommendation letter may turn on role-specific truthfulness, confidentiality, bias, and procedural review.

The local character of the definition also limits application. A co-experience claim requires evidence of relational source dependence. A justice claim requires a specified normative bridge. A responsibility claim requires role-, capacity-, history-, and agency-sensitive grounds. The combined framework organizes these burdens and preserves their distinct status.

Plural Epistemic Standing

This subsection distinguishes recurring grounds for consideration, voice, authority, protection, or remedy. Table [tab:standing] records the characteristic claim and scope tension associated with each standing relation.

@p0.16Y Y Y@ Standing relation & Ground & Characteristic claim & Scope tension
Affectedness & exposure to stakes or consequences & consideration, protection, explanation, or remedy & expertise and public purpose
Source participation & contribution to a formative relation & attribution, consultation, reply, or continuity involvement & disagreement among participants
Experiential position & situated access to a kind of experience & interpretive weight and protection from extraction & internal diversity and external criticism
Expertise & reliable domain competence & evidential or decisional weight within a field & experience and democratic legitimacy
Representational mandate & authorized speaking or decision role & bounded authority on behalf of others & informal voices and minority dissent
Custodianship & entrusted care for records or practices & preservation and access governance & openness, privacy, and source authority
Institutional role & assigned public or organizational function & decision, review, enforcement, or repair & legitimacy, capture, and role conflict

Standing is relational and issue-specific. An actor has standing with respect to an object, stage, decision, or consequence. The relations in Table [tab:standing] are nonfungible. Technical expertise leaves affectedness intact. Deep affectedness leaves causal expertise open. Source participation leaves representative mandate open. Custody supplies duties of care and leaves interpretive supremacy open. Procedures should preserve these distinctions before weighing or reconciling them.

Standing can support different procedural forms. Consideration requires decision-makers to register relevant interests and harms. Voice permits expression. Uptake requires an institution to process what was expressed. Contestability provides reasons, response, and revision paths. Authority gives an actor a scoped role in determining an outcome. Protection constrains exposure, retaliation, extraction, or disclosure. Remedy addresses a diagnosed harm, wrong, injustice, or damaged relation. Treating all seven as participation hides their differences.

Participation and Authority

This subsection states the argument separating source participation from later authority. The objective is to protect participant standing while preserving truth, expertise, mandate, criticism, custody, and public responsibility as independently grounded relations.

The argument proceeds through five premises:

1. A co-experience participant can contribute to formation and possess situated access unavailable to an external actor.

2. Later stages concern different objects and decisions, including editing, classification, factual interpretation, public use, archival custody, and resource allocation.

3. These decisions can require distinct competencies, mandates, duties, and accountability relations.

4. Source participation therefore supplies a reason whose force depends on the standing type, stage, object, purpose, and stakes.

5. A warranted authority assignment combines that reason with relevant evidence, countervailing standing, safeguards, and revision conditions.

Claim 8 (Participation–authority separation). Source participation and downstream authority are distinct predicates. A transition from participation to authority requires an explicit bridge concerning the standing relation, stage, object, decision, purpose, evidence, and countervailing grounds.

The claim blocks two symmetric reductions. One reduction treats participants as interchangeable information sources whose relation to formation carries little significance. The other grants comprehensive authority over every later proposition, criticism, use, or audience. Scoped standing permits a participant to possess decisive authority over consent or first-person effects while an external critic holds strong evidential standing concerning a factual claim. A representative can hold a mandate for access governance and a narrower mandate for interpretation. A custodian can govern preservation while remaining answerable to source communities and public obligations.

This account also recognizes conflicts among participants. Source relations can contain dominance, dependency, or exclusion. Later participants can reinterpret earlier experiences. Minority voices within a community can challenge authorized representatives. The solution lies in mandate, scope, contestability, protection, and evidence, considered together.

Bridge-Explicit Judgment

This subsection specifies the inferential record required for a stage-sensitive judgment. Its role is to make normative reasoning inspectable and to keep mathematical notation from carrying an undeclared moral conclusion.

Let a proposed judgment concern coordinate $k$. Its warrant record has the form

$$\mathcal B_k=(o_k,A_k,s_k,N_k,E_k,F_k,M_k),
\label{eq:bridge}$$

where $o_k$ is the epistemic object, $A_k$ the affected or accountable party, $s_k$ the operative stage, $N_k$ the applicable standard, $E_k$ the evidence, $F_k$ the live defeaters, and $M_k$ the relevant response or remedy. Equation [eq:bridge] supplies a reporting grammar. The content and justification of $N_k$ come from a substantive normative or domain theory.

Definition 9 (Bridge-explicit judgment). A bridge-explicit judgment states the descriptive transformation and evidence, identifies the party and standing relation, names the normative ground and scope, records countervailing reasons and uncertainty, and links the classification to a response relation.

The record localizes disagreement. Analysts can agree on a transformation and disagree on harm. They can agree on harm and disagree on whether the governing ground establishes a wrong or injustice. They can agree on injustice and assign different responsibilities through agency, role, benefit, social connection, or capacity. Each disagreement appears at a named component.

Evaluation Sites and Status Registers

This subsection separates the sites at which a transmission can be evaluated and the statuses attached to those sites. Table [tab:normative-sites] connects each site to characteristic standards and responses.

@p0.17Y Y Y@ Evaluation site & Principal concern & Illustrative normative grounds & Response object
Epistemic object & accuracy, intelligibility, uncertainty, provenance & truthfulness, epistemic quality, evidential duty & trace, description, interpretation
Relational position & standing, trust, recognition, extraction, mandate & respect, consent, reciprocity, self-determination & attribution, voice, authority, protection
Institutional procedure & selection, classification, uptake, appeal & fairness, due process, public role, professional duty & rule, workflow, reasons, review
Consequence distribution & opportunity, burden, benefit, exposure & equality, anti-domination, redress, benefit sharing & allocation, use, restitution, safeguard
Future capacity & revision, learning, succession, regeneration & sustainability, capability, intergenerational responsibility & infrastructure, access, teaching, successor relation

An epistemically relevant transformation changes access, intelligibility, credibility, provenance, competence, or future inquiry. A harm concerns an adverse effect on a person, group, practice, institution, or epistemic good under a specified account. A wrong concerns a violated claim, duty, respect relation, or legitimate expectation owed to a party. An injustice connects an event or arrangement to a discriminatory, structural, procedural, relational, distributive, historical, or domination-based ground. Dunne and Kotsonis give a direct antecedent for separating epistemic harms from epistemic wrongs (Dunne and Kotsonis 2025).

Culpability evaluates an actor through knowledge, intention, negligence, capacity, excuse, and role. Institutional answerability concerns past rules, authorized action, entrusted duties, organizational continuity, and causal contribution. Forward-looking institutional responsibility concerns present connection, power, role, resources, coordination, and remedy capacity. Legal liability depends on a jurisdiction, cause of action, elements, evidence, procedure, standing, limitation rules, and remedy. Young, Isaacs, and Walker supply different antecedents for structural responsibility, collective agency, and relational repair (Young 2011; Isaacs 2011; Walker 2006).

The evaluation sites and status registers cross-cut each other. An inaccurate object can create a wrong through breach of an evidential duty. A faithful object can participate in injustice through coerced formation or discriminatory use. A fair procedure can yield harmful consequences through unforeseen conditions. A successful correction can leave trust and future capacity damaged. The framework therefore preserves a plural output.

Burden, Benefit, and Relational Repair

This subsection extends evaluation beyond voice and accuracy. It considers who supplies epistemic labor, who gains value, who bears exposure, and which relation a remedy seeks to reconstruct.

Participation can require narration, translation, emotional labor, cultural explanation, correction, repeated consultation, or risk of retaliation. Berenstain’s account of epistemic exploitation provides a major reason to track these burdens alongside influence and benefit (Berenstain 2016). A process can invite extensive testimony and reserve all selection, interpretation, and use powers for the institution. Increased participation then coexists with concentrated authority and accumulated burden.

Benefit also has several forms. Participants can receive material return, attribution, improved public understanding, institutional change, strengthened collective capacity, or wider audience. Institutions can receive legitimacy, administrative knowledge, revenue, reputation, or lower decision costs. A justice analysis should trace benefit through use and consequence while preserving differences among these goods.

Repair has at least five possible objects, corresponding to Table [tab:normative-sites]. Object repair corrects or supplements a trace or interpretation. Standing repair acknowledges a source relation, restores voice, or recognizes a mandate. Procedural repair changes selection, coding, access, reasons, review, or appeal. Consequence repair addresses material or relational effects. Generative repair restores conditions for future inquiry, practice, teaching, reinterpretation, and successor participation.

Claim 10 (Plural repair objects). Correction of a transmitted object, restoration of epistemic standing, reform of institutional procedure, redress of consequences, and reconstruction of future generative conditions are distinct remedial achievements.

The claim explains why a corrected document can leave a damaged relation in place and why an apology can leave an injurious allocation unchanged. It also explains why durable preservation can remain inadequate for a practice whose future transmission requires people, language, resources, trust, and institutional support.

Formal Architecture of Co-Experience Transmission

This section translates the preceding philosophical distinctions into a formal diagnostic. It introduces the stage set, typed objects, transformation maps, target-indexed fidelity, plural continuity, actor profiles, and model boundaries. The formalism serves type checking, explicit comparison, and limited derivation.

Domains and Stage Maps

This subsection defines the trajectory and the types carried by its nodes. The formalism is a bookkeeping system for heterogeneous relations and a source of limited logical consequences.

Let

$$\mathcal S={\mathrm{for},\mathrm{sel},\mathrm{sym},\mathrm{int},
\mathrm{cir},\mathrm{use},\mathrm{con},\mathrm{pre},\mathrm{rep}}
\label{eq:stages}$$

denote formation, selection, symbolization, interpretation, circulation, use, consequence, preservation, and repair. A readable projection of a trajectory is

$$\mathcal E
\xrightarrow{\mathcal G_\theta}K_\theta
\xrightarrow{S_m}Z_m
\xrightarrow{I_{b,c}}\widehat K_{b,c}
\xrightarrow{C_h}Z_m^{\mathcal A}
\xrightarrow{U_o}O
\xrightarrow{\Gamma}(D,\mathcal E’),
\label{eq:trajectory}$$

where $\mathcal E$ is a co-experience configuration; $K_\theta$ is target-indexed knowledge; $Z_m$ is a trace in medium $m$; $\widehat K_{b,c}$ is interpretation by actor $b$ in context $c$; $Z_m^{\mathcal A}$ is the trace as circulated to audience $\mathcal A$; $O$ is uptake or use; $D$ is a consequence distribution; and $\mathcal E’$ contains later epistemic and relational conditions. Preservation acts across the trace and its condition record; repair can target any node, edge, or governing institution.

Assumption 11 (Typed heterogeneity). The objects in Eq. [eq:trajectory] belong to distinct domains. Equality, fidelity, ownership, authority, and justice relations across those domains require declared comparison maps and bridge premises.

The trajectory can branch and recur. A circulated interpretation can alter later formation, and a repair can create a revised trace. The linear display identifies operations without asserting a linear social process.

Target-Indexed Fidelity and Continuity

This subsection formalizes the plural-continuity thesis. It first types fidelity through a declared comparison target and then represents four continuity dimensions without aggregating them.

Let $K\in\mathcal X$ be a source knowledge object and $Z=S(K)\in\mathcal Z$ its trace. A target $q$ supplies comparison maps $u_q:\mathcal X\to V_q$ and $v_q:\mathcal Z\to V_q$, together with a normalized discrepancy $d_q:V_q\times V_q\to[0,1]$. Define

$$\operatorname{Fit}_q(K,Z)
=1-d_q\bigl(u_q(K),v_q(Z)\bigr).
\label{eq:target-fit}$$

Equation [eq:target-fit] makes source and trace comparable only with respect to $q$. Consider $K=(u,v)$ and $S(u,v)=u$. A target $q_1$ selecting $u$ can yield complete fidelity. The trace omits the source-specific value required by a target $q_2$ selecting $v$. The same transformation can therefore preserve one target fully while leaving another unidentified.

Proposition 12 (Target-dependence of fidelity). Target-free scalar fidelity remains undefined under the typed architecture. Any scalar or ordered comparison requires declared target maps, a discrepancy relation, and, for several targets, an aggregation or ordering rule.

For a trajectory $\tau$ and content target $q$, define the continuity profile

$$\bm\chi_{\tau,q}

\bigl(
\chi^{\mathrm{obj}}{\tau,q},
\chi^{\mathrm{rel}}{\tau},
\chi^{\mathrm{auth}}{\tau},
\chi^{\mathrm{gen}}{\tau}
\bigr)
\in{0,1,?}^{4},
\label{eq:continuity-profile}$$

where the coordinates denote target-relative object continuity, participant and provenance linkage, interpretive-authority continuity, and generative-condition continuity. The value $?$ records unresolved evidence or standards. The counterexamples described in Section 2 vary these coordinates separately. Equation [eq:continuity-profile] therefore leaves unrestricted cross-coordinate relations open.

The profile is an assessment architecture. Domain applications can replace the ternary values with qualitative dossiers, partial orders, intervals, or validated measures. Aggregation requires an explicit purpose and normative rule. Privacy, safety, legitimate restriction, revision, and finite resources can support lower values on one coordinate while preserving justice under a specified standard.

Stage-Specific Agency

This subsection represents actor powers and institutional conditions across the trajectory. Each coordinate requires domain-specific operationalization and can be qualitative, ordinal, probabilistic, or set-valued in an application.

For actor $i$, define

$$\mathbf a_i=
\bigl(a_i^{\mathrm{for}},a_i^{\mathrm{sel}},a_i^{\mathrm{sym}},
a_i^{\mathrm{int}},a_i^{\mathrm{cir}},a_i^{\mathrm{use}},
a_i^{\mathrm{con}},a_i^{\mathrm{pre}},a_i^{\mathrm{rep}}\bigr)
\in[0,1]^9.
\label{eq:agency}$$

The coordinates can represent effective ability to shape, authorize, refuse, contest, revise, or redirect the local operation. Let the institutional environment profile be

$$\mathbf p_i=(x_i,v_i,c_i,r_i,b_i,q_i),
\label{eq:environment}$$

where $x$ is access, $v$ voice, $c$ contestability, $r$ revision capacity, $b$ benefit reach, and $q$ protection from avoidable burden or retaliation. The pair $(\mathbf a_i,\mathbf p_i)$ distinguishes direct power from enabling conditions.

Table [tab:stages] links each stage to an object, characteristic power, and remedy family. The table is diagnostic. A justice judgment requires a separate bridge record.

@p0.15p0.21Y Y@ Stage & Epistemic object & Characteristic power & Response family
Formation & relation, testimony, practice & admission, agenda, interaction design & participation design, support, protected refusal
Selection & retained and omitted material & inclusion, emphasis, classification & review, supplementation, omission notice
Symbolization & text, recording, category, metadata & framing, compression, editing & correction, provenance, auxiliary record
Interpretation & meaning, credibility, narrative & uptake, conceptual framing, evaluation & reply, counter-interpretation, concept development
Circulation & audience and access path & publication, ranking, restriction & tiered access, notification, portability
Use & decision, pedagogy, allocation & application, authorization, monetization & appeal, use limit, benefit sharing
Consequence & effects and future conditions & distribution, enforcement, feedback & restitution, capacity restoration, institutional change
Preservation & trace and condition record & custody, retention, migration, deletion & governed access, migration, return, justified deletion
Repair & corrected object and relation & acknowledgment, revision, resource allocation & stage-matched correction, redesign, monitoring

Model Commitments

This subsection states the formalism’s interpretive limits. The model supports type checking, counterexamples, and information analysis while leaving substantive norm selection to philosophical and domain inquiry.

The numerical ranges in Eqs. [eq:agency] and [eq:environment] are representational conveniences. Interpersonal comparability and an aggregate justice score require added assumptions. An empirical study must specify indicators, validation procedures, uncertainty, and sensitivity to measurement choices. A qualitative dossier can use the same coordinates as ordered questions. The formalism’s strongest conclusions concern admissible assignments and indistinguishability under declared maps.

Formal Diagnosis of Standing and Responsibility

This section derives the separation between source participation and downstream power, represents plural standing and scoped authority, and formalizes layered normative and responsibility judgments. The results constrain inference while leaving substantive standards to the preceding philosophical argument and domain evidence.

Participation–Agency Countermodel

This subsection constructs the minimal counterexample. Let $P_i(\mathcal E)=1$ mean that actor $i$ materially participates in the source configuration, and let $A_i^s=1$ mean effective agency at stage $s$.

Choose a participant $i$ and an organization $g$ such that

$$P_i(\mathcal E)=1,
\qquad
a_i^{\mathrm{for}}>0,
\qquad
a_i^s=0
\quad
\text{for }s\in
{\mathrm{sel},\mathrm{sym},\mathrm{int},\mathrm{cir},\mathrm{use},\mathrm{con}}.
\label{eq:countermodel}$$

Let $g$ hold the corresponding downstream powers. Equation [eq:countermodel] is admissible under the stage model. Hence the sharp general lower bound on later agency is zero.

Proposition 13 (Participation–agency non-entailment). Within the typed transmission architecture, the sharp general lower bound on $a_i^s$ at a later stage $s$, conditional only on $P_i(\mathcal E)=1$, equals zero. A positive lower bound requires an added institutional or normative bridge.

Proof. Equation [eq:countermodel] assigns source participation and zero later-stage agency while satisfying the domain constraints in Eq. [eq:agency]. It is therefore a witness against the entailment. A positive lower bound requires an additional axiom. ◻

The result is logical and limited. It establishes conceptual separation. Legitimacy and participant entitlements remain open normative questions.

Standing Profiles

This subsection represents the plurality shown in Table [tab:standing]. For actor $i$, stage $s$, and object $o$, define a standing profile

$$\bm\sigma_{i,s,o}=
(\sigma^{\mathrm{aff}},\sigma^{\mathrm{part}},\sigma^{\mathrm{exp}},
\sigma^{\mathrm{expert}},\sigma^{\mathrm{mand}},\sigma^{\mathrm{cust}},
\sigma^{\mathrm{inst}})_{i,s,o}.
\label{eq:standing}$$

Each coordinate records the presence, strength, or evidential support for one standing relation. Ordering and aggregation require a decision-specific rule

$$\mathcal A_{s,o,d}

\Phi_{s,o,d}
\bigl({\bm\sigma_{i,s,o}}{i\in\mathcal I},
{\mathbf a_i,\mathbf p_i}{i\in\mathcal I},N_d,E_d,F_d\bigr),
\label{eq:authority}$$

where $\mathcal A_{s,o,d}$ is an authority or participation arrangement for decision $d$, $N_d$ is its governing norm, $E_d$ its evidence, and $F_d$ its defeaters.

Claim 14 (Scope-indexed authority). A defensible authority assignment states its object, stage, decision, standing relations, purpose, evidential basis, limits, contestability path, and revision conditions.

The claim supports differentiated arrangements. Consent authority, curatorial expertise, factual criticism, community governance, and public accountability can coexist when their scopes are explicit. Conflict remains possible and becomes a substantive question for the governing domain.

Procedural Consequences

This subsection translates plural standing into a small set of procedural requirements. These requirements remain defeasible under safety, privacy, emergency, resource, and legitimate-restriction conditions.

First, institutions should identify standing before designing a single participation channel. Second, voice should connect to a specified stage and decision. Third, contestability requires an uptake path, response time, reasons, and revision mechanism. Fourth, representation requires a mandate and a way to assess scope or recall. Fifth, consultation burdens should be tracked alongside influence and benefit. Berenstain’s account of epistemic exploitation gives a central reason for the fifth requirement (Berenstain 2016). Sixth, external criticism and participant knowledge should meet through explicit standards of relevance and evidence.

Layered Status and Responsibility

This subsection defines the status profile and its warrant records, derives non-implications, and presents a resource-relative responsibility audit. The aim preserves disciplined plural judgment and leaves scalar aggregation open.

Extended Status Profile

This subsection defines the diagnostic output. For event $x$, actor $i$, institution $g$, and jurisdiction $\ell$, let

$$\mathbf y^\star(x;i,g,\ell)=
(T_x,H_x,W_x,J_x,C_{i,x},R^-{g,x},R^+{g,x},Q^\ell_x)
\in{0,1,?}^{8}.
\label{eq:status}$$

The coordinates denote transformation, harm, wrong, injustice, actor culpability, backward-looking institutional responsibility, forward-looking institutional responsibility, and jurisdiction-specific liability. The value $?$ records unresolved evidence or standards. Every resolved coordinate carries a bridge record of the form in Eq. [eq:bridge].

Table [tab:status] records the distinct question and evidence family associated with each coordinate. Its separation follows the literature’s warnings against collapsing harm, wrong, structural injustice, blame, and responsibility (Dunne and Kotsonis 2025; Young 2011; Isaacs 2011).

@p0.10p0.19Y Y@ Symbol & Status & Governing relation & Evidence family
$T$ & transformation or loss & change relative to target and baseline & source, trace, comparison map, omitted feature
$H$ & epistemic harm & adverse effect under a harm account & affected good, counterfactual or threshold, severity, duration
$W$ & epistemic wrong & claim or duty owed to a party & standing, duty, breach, scope, excuse
$J$ & epistemic injustice & injustice-making structure or relation & discrimination, domination, procedure, distribution, history
$C_i$ & actor culpability & agency, knowledge, intention, negligence, excuse & role, foresight, alternatives, contribution, capacity
$R^-_g$ & institutional answerability & past operation, agency, or entrusted role & rule, procedure, organizational continuity, causal path
$R^+_g$ & institutional repair responsibility & social connection, power, benefit, role, or remedy capacity & present capacity, coordination, burden, expected efficacy
$Q^\ell$ & legal liability & jurisdiction-specific legal elements & authority, doctrine, standing, evidence, limitation, remedy

Cross-Register Countermodels

This subsection establishes the logical independence needed for cautious classification. The countermodels are conceptual witnesses whose role is limited to logical separation.

Consider four arrangements. A transcript omits irrelevant vocal noise while improving access; this supplies transformation with limited harm. A flood destroys a responsibly maintained local archive; this can produce harm while an injustice classification remains unsupported. A long-standing procedure predictably excludes a group while every current employee has limited knowledge and unilateral power; this can support structural injustice while individual culpability remains unresolved. An actor knowingly distorts testimony in a setting where a relevant cause of action is unavailable; culpability and legal liability can diverge.

Hence the unrestricted implications

$$T=1\Rightarrow H=1,
\quad
H=1\Rightarrow W=1,
\quad
W=1\Rightarrow J=1,
\quad
J=1\Rightarrow C_i=1,
\quad
C_i=1\Rightarrow Q^\ell=1
\label{eq:nonimplications}$$

each admit countermodels in the general diagnostic. Equation [eq:nonimplications] records candidate implications under examination; the witnesses reject their unrestricted forms. Specific theories can establish narrower bridges under additional premises.

Resource-Relative Responsibility

This subsection identifies inputs for actor and institutional responsibility. It draws a boundary between an observed injustice and the allocation of duties, blame, answerability, or repair work.

For actor $i$, stage $s$, and time $t$, define

$$\mathbf d_{i,s,t}=
(\rho_{i,s,t},\pi_{i,s,t},f_{i,s,t},e_{i,s,t},v_{i,s,t},
q_{i,s,t},u_{i,s,t},h_{i,s,t}),
\label{eq:duty}$$

where the entries represent role, effective power, feasible knowledge acquisition, foreseeable stakes, available safeguards, causal contribution, remedy capacity, and benefit from the arrangement. A domain theory maps this profile, together with norms and conflicts, to a defeasible duty set:

$$\mathcal D_{i,s,t}
=\Psi(\mathbf d_{i,s,t},N_s,\mathcal C_{i,s,t},\mathcal K_t),
\label{eq:dutymap}$$

where $\mathcal C$ contains conflicts, costs, and excuses, and $\mathcal K_t$ contains collective allocation conditions. The function $\Psi$ remains theory- and domain-dependent.

Young’s social-connection model motivates attention to power, privilege, interest, and collective capacity in forward-looking responsibility (Young 2011). Medina’s treatment of shared epistemic responsibility supplies a closer epistemic antecedent (Medina 2013). The present profile adds stage and remedy capacity for diagnostic use. It retains culpability as a separate coordinate.

Institutional Responsibility Directions

This subsection separates two institutional questions. Backward-looking responsibility concerns how an institution’s rules, procedures, authorized agents, and organizational continuity relate to an earlier event. Forward-looking responsibility concerns its present relation and capacity to prevent recurrence or repair conditions.

An institution can score $R^-_g=?$ and $R^+_g=1$ when archival history remains incomplete while present custody and unique remedy capacity are clear. It can score $R^-_g=1$ and possess limited $R^+_g$ when the responsible organization has dissolved and successor powers are weak. These cases show why responsibility allocation requires both historical and prospective analysis.

Formal Limits and Condition-Bearing Repair

This section links diagnosis to remedy and proves a limited constraint on downstream correction. It states a relevance principle, derives trace-only non-recovery, introduces auxiliary channels, and connects repair to condition-bearing preservation and governed future access.

Mechanism and Response Alignment

This subsection formulates the minimum connection between an identified mechanism and a proposed response. The principle preserves the possibility of multi-stage remedies while requiring a causal or institutional path to the operative mechanism.

Let $m_s$ be a mechanism operating at stage $s$, and let intervention $r$ act at stage $s’$. Define $\operatorname{Reach}(r,m_s)=1$ when a justified model supplies a path through which $r$ can alter the operation, exposure, or consequence of $m_s$.

Definition 15 (Mechanism-relevant remedy). A remedy $r$ is mechanism-relevant for diagnosis $m_s$ when $\operatorname{Reach}(r,m_s)=1$, its intended beneficiaries and burdens are specified, and its expected effect is assessed against feasible alternatives and recurrence risks.

Selection exclusion can call for review, supplementation, plural selection, or an omission record. Interpretive foreclosure can call for reply, counter-interpretation, concept development, or a change in credibility procedures. Harmful downstream use can call for appeal, use limitation, alternative evidence, or revised allocation. A generic increase in participation may leave each of these mechanisms intact. Table [tab:stages] records the first-pass alignment.

Claim 16 (Stage-matched relevance). A proposed remedy gains diagnostic relevance through a warranted path to the mechanism-bearing stage or through a compensating path to the affected consequence. Symbolic similarity between remedy language and injustice language supplies insufficient evidence of reach.

Stage alignment supplies a minimum condition. Social mechanisms can span stages, and effective remedies can require coordinated changes. The claim therefore supports path tracing across local and interacting stages.

Trace-Only Non-Recovery

This subsection derives the paper’s exact informational result. The theorem concerns a declared target feature and a many-to-one trace map. Its normative importance remains case-dependent.

Let $X$ be a source-state space, $Z$ a trace space, and $Y$ a target-feature space. Let $S:X\to Z$ represent selection or symbolization, and let $g:X\to Y$ be the feature later inquiry seeks to recover.

Proposition 17 (Trace-only non-recovery). Suppose there exist $x,x’\in X$ such that $$S(x)=S(x’),
\qquad
g(x)\ne g(x’).
\label{eq:collision}$$ Then every deterministic reconstruction $R:Z\to Y$ based only on the trace fails to recover $g$ correctly for at least one member of ${x,x’}$.

Proof. Equality in Eq. [eq:collision] gives $$R(S(x))=R(S(x’)).
\label{eq:substitution}$$ The target values differ. The common reconstruction value can equal at most one of them. Hence $R\circ S$ differs from $g$ on at least one source state. ◻

A randomized reconstruction kernel $\kappa(\cdot\mid z)$ receives the same conditioning value for both source states:

$$\kappa(\cdot\mid S(x))=\kappa(\cdot\mid S(x’)).
\label{eq:random}$$

Randomization may improve expected performance under a prior distribution. Source-specific identification between the two states remains unavailable through the trace alone.

The proposition is elementary. Its role is also precise. Wider circulation of the same trace, increased interpretive effort, and a more powerful trace-only model all remain bounded by the collision. Downstream access can produce valuable interpretation while the erased source distinction remains unidentified.

Auxiliary Channels and Recoverability

This subsection states the informational condition under which later discrimination becomes possible. Auxiliary channels include provenance, parallel records, retained source access, interactive clarification, revision history, or another observation.

Let $A:X\to V$ be an auxiliary channel. If

$$\bigl(S(x),A(x)\bigr)\ne
\bigl(S(x’),A(x’)\bigr),
\label{eq:auxiliary}$$

then the augmented representation separates this pair. A function on $Z\times V$ can assign distinct values to the two augmented inputs.

Claim 18 (Auxiliary-channel possibility). Pairwise separation by an auxiliary channel restores the possibility of target discrimination for that pair. Reliable recovery additionally requires sufficient coverage, valid provenance, accessible interpretation, and an accurate reconstruction rule.

Equation [eq:auxiliary] also creates governance questions. A named source can improve accountability and increase retaliation risk. Detailed formation conditions can support criticism and expose private or culturally restricted knowledge. The informational value of a channel and the legitimacy of its disclosure are separate assessments.

Repair Burdens and Recurrence

This subsection examines the distribution of work created by a remedy. A response can repair one coordinate while worsening another.

Inviting affected participants to correct a report can restore information and impose additional uncompensated labor. Publishing every source can improve traceability and create privacy, safety, or appropriation risks. Centralizing correction can improve consistency and weaken local authority. Compensation can address a consequence while selection and interpretation rules continue to reproduce it. The remedy audit should therefore record

$$\mathbf m(r)=
(\operatorname{Reach},\operatorname{Benefit},\operatorname{Burden},
\operatorname{Consent},\operatorname{Recurrence},\operatorname{Revision})_r.
\label{eq:remedyprofile}$$

The profile keeps its coordinates separate and leaves utility construction open. Berenstain’s account of epistemic exploitation makes labor and opportunity cost central to the burden coordinate (Berenstain 2016). Professional and community protocols govern consent and disclosure in their domains (Oral History Association 2018; Society of American Archivists 2025; Carroll et al. 2020).

Condition-Bearing Preservation

This subsection connects future contestability with preservation design. It defines a condition-bearing record, separates four sustainability coordinates, and develops the joint governance of access, restriction, and revision.

Record and Condition Architecture

This subsection defines the preserved object. The construction joins an epistemic trace with information needed to inspect its formation, transformation, authority, and later revision.

Represent a preserved knowledge object at time $t$ as

$$\Pi_t=(K_t,C_t^K),
\qquad
C_t^K=(\mathrm{src},\mathrm{meth},\mathrm{pos},\mathrm{unc},
\mathrm{miss},\mathrm{ctx},\mathrm{restr},\mathrm{rev})_t,
\label{eq:record}$$

where the condition record contains sources, methods, positions, uncertainty, missing voices, context, restrictions, and revision history or pathways. The fields can contain explicit unknowns and contested accounts. They preserve conditions for later inquiry while completeness remains open.

Definition 19 (Epistemic sustainability). Epistemic sustainability is the capacity of a record and its institutional setting to preserve enough content, provenance, formation conditions, uncertainty, plurality, and revision access for later agents to trace, reassess, and regenerate warranted inquiry.

The definition emphasizes future epistemic operations. SAA guidance connects preservation and access with transparency, accountability, trust, source communities, and culturally sensitive restrictions (Society of American Archivists 2025). OHA guidance emphasizes the collaborative relation, continuing engagement, participant rights, ethics, and archiving (Oral History Association 2018). Caswell and Cifor’s relational ethics expands the field of archival responsibility across creators, subjects, users, and communities (Caswell and Cifor 2016).

Sustainability Coordinates

This subsection separates operational capacities that a single preservation score can hide. Define

$$\mathbf s(\Pi_t)=(p_t,\ell_t,r_t,g_t),
\label{eq:sustainability}$$

where $p$ is persistence, $\ell$ traceability, $r$ revisability, and $g$ regenerability. A durable opaque record can score high on persistence and low on traceability. A transparent record can remain hard to revise when its institution lacks a correction channel. A living practice can sustain successor formation while maintaining a sparse documentary record. The coordinates therefore guide different interventions.

Proposition 20 (Sustainability-coordinate independence). The general record architecture contains admissible cases in which each coordinate in Eq. [eq:sustainability] varies while at least one other coordinate remains fixed. A scalar preservation measure therefore requires an application-specific aggregation rule.

Proof. A stable encrypted object supplies high persistence with low accessible traceability. An immutable public record supplies persistence and traceability with low revisability. A revisable digital record without competent successors supplies high revision capacity with low regenerability. An orally transmitted practice supplies regenerability with limited documentary persistence. These witnesses establish conceptual independence inside the scheme. ◻

Governed Access and Legitimate Restriction

This subsection develops the tension between future criticism and controlled access. The objective is an authority-sensitive architecture with openness as one governed coordinate.

The CARE Principles place collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics within Indigenous data governance (Carroll et al. 2020). SAA guidance recognizes obligations concerning culturally sensitive materials and source communities (Society of American Archivists 2025). These practices show that accessibility is one coordinate among several. A condition record can preserve the existence, basis, duration, and review procedure of a restriction while withholding protected content.

Let access policy $\alpha_t$ map roles and contexts to permitted operations:

$$\alpha_t:(i,c,o)\longmapsto
{\mathrm{discover},\mathrm{view},\mathrm{quote},\mathrm{revise},
\mathrm{reuse},\mathrm{train},\mathrm{return},\mathrm{delete}}_{i,c,o}.
\label{eq:access}$$

A defensible policy records its authority, object scope, purpose, duration, risk assessment, appeal path, and revision procedure. The operation set prevents “access” from functioning as a single binary variable. Discovery can be public while viewing is restricted; community stewards can authorize research use while commercial reuse remains outside scope.

Open Problem 21 (Restriction and future criticism). Develop domain-specific protocols that preserve legitimate privacy, safety, consent, and source-community authority while maintaining sufficient metadata and review paths for future accountability.

Comparative Case Reconstructions

This section tests the framework through four constructed cases. Each reconstruction identifies the co-experience claim, transformation sequence, continuity profile, standing relations, normative bridge, and response. The comparative aim is to determine whether the framework changes inquiry or remedy beyond a strong application of established concepts.

Recommendation Letter

This subsection uses a recommendation letter as a limiting interpersonal case. Its role is to test the scope of co-experience and the value of differentiated authority. A student and professor share classes, supervision, and research; the professor forms evaluative knowledge through these relations, selects episodes, and writes a confidential letter; a committee interprets the letter and allocates an opportunity.

The co-experience claim concerns the formation of some evaluative knowledge through interaction. It leaves the letter’s authorship and the committee’s mandate open. The student holds affectedness, source participation, and first-person access to several events. The professor holds source participation, role-specific expertise, evidential responsibility, and the institutional role of recommender. The committee holds a bounded mandate to compare evidence under the selection procedure. These grounds support differentiated powers.

The continuity profile exposes further variation. The letter can preserve the professor’s sincere judgment while selecting a narrow history. Attribution to the professor preserves authorship while leaving the student’s source relation implicit. Confidentiality can protect candid assessment and reduce contestability. The committee’s use can transform a qualitative relation into a consequential ranking. The future relation may be damaged by retaliation, factual error, or opaque procedure even when the document remains intact.

Epistemic-injustice theory supplies the principal analysis where prejudicial credibility or hermeneutical marginalization drives the result (Fricker 2007; Anderson 2012). The stage model adds practical discrimination when the mechanism lies elsewhere. Factual error at symbolization supports verification or a correction channel. Undisclosed conflict supports review of the recommender’s role. Interpretive bias supports evaluator training, plural review, or reasons. Overreliance at use supports alternative evidence and appeal. A general increase in co-authorship would change the evidential genre and can weaken the letter’s role-specific value.

The case therefore supports scoped authority. Participant standing gives the student claims to fair formation conditions, protection from retaliation and discriminatory representation, and suitable correction or appeal paths. The professor’s authority remains bounded by truthfulness, competence, confidentiality, and institutional duty. The committee’s authority remains bounded by procedure, evidence, review, and consequence. The framework earns value if these distinctions lead to different safeguards from a single demand for voice.

Oral-History Archive

This subsection examines a collaborative record with a long afterlife. A narrator and interviewer form a recorded account through memory, prompts, trust, language, genre expectations, and the circumstances of the encounter. An editor and archive select, describe, preserve, and govern access. Later researchers create interpretations for audiences absent from the source relation.

The co-experience claim is strong when the interview relation shapes what becomes tellable, recalled, clarified, or interpreted. The narrator remains the principal authority concerning personal experience while the interviewer contributes questions, context, and a situated relation. Later editors and archivists shape the durable object and its discoverability. Researchers bring historical methods and comparative evidence. Source communities can hold authority grounded in collective relation, cultural governance, or consequences. These forms of standing overlap without becoming identical.

The OHA principles make collaboration, continuing participation, ethical relation, power sensitivity, and archiving central to responsible practice (Oral History Association 2018). SAA guidance adds access, accountability, trust, and source-community relations (Society of American Archivists 2025). Caswell and Cifor’s relational archival ethics directs attention to creators, subjects, users, and communities (Caswell and Cifor 2016). A transmission audit should therefore include consent scope, edit history, narrator review where appropriate, description, restrictions, revision channels, later use, and community consequences.

The four continuity dimensions separate common achievements. A transcript can preserve words and weaken pragmatic context. Rich provenance can preserve participant linkage and expose private relations. Narrator review can strengthen authority continuity while later historical criticism remains available under evidential standards. A durable archive can support object continuity while language loss and institutional withdrawal weaken generative conditions. The analysis thus resists a single preservation score.

The trace-only proposition identifies an exact limit. If editing maps two contextually different source states to one retained passage while the difference matters to target interpretation, a later reader of that passage cannot recover the distinction through the passage alone. A full recording, governed field note, edit history, participant clarification, or parallel testimony can serve as an auxiliary channel. Accuracy and legitimacy remain further questions. Consent, safety, privacy, cultural authority, and changing risk can justify restricted access or deletion.

Stage localization changes remedy. A problem in interview conditions calls for changed formation practices. Selective editing calls for source-linked review or an omission record. Misleading archival description calls for revised metadata and a visible revision history. Harmful circulation calls for access governance. Extractive later use calls for consent, benefit, attribution, or community-authority analysis. A generic transcript correction reaches only part of this route.

Community Consultation Report

This subsection examines institutional translation from plural testimony to policy. Residents describe heterogeneous experiences in meetings, interviews, and written submissions. A contractor selects material, constructs a codebook, assigns passages to categories, and summarizes frequencies or themes. An agency publishes a report. A ministry converts the report into a decision that alters local conditions.

The co-experience claim can attach at several levels. Residents may develop shared interpretations through collective discussion. Facilitators can shape which contrasts become visible. Coders can generate a second-order object from several accounts. The report can function as a boundary object among residents, consultants, officials, and technical experts. Star and Griesemer’s analysis helps explain coordination across these heterogeneous worlds (Star and Griesemer 1989). Bowker and Star’s work makes the category system itself an object of moral and political scrutiny (Bowker and Star 1999).

High attendance measures formation-stage access. It supplies little evidence about selection, code construction, interpretive uptake, policy use, or consequence. A process can therefore display extensive participation and low participant agency across its consequential stages. It can also impose repeated explanatory labor on residents while institutional actors retain the power to define relevance. Berenstain’s account gives a reason to audit that burden (Berenstain 2016).

The injustice judgment requires a bridge. Procedural exclusion requires evidence about recruitment, accessibility, promises, and decision rules. Misrepresentation requires a target and source–trace comparison. Testimonial injustice requires evidence about credibility practices. Domination requires an account of arbitrary or uncontrolled power. Historical injustice requires a relevant genealogy. A breached commitment requires the commitment’s content, authority, and scope. The eight-coordinate profile preserves uncertainty when these grounds diverge.

The remedy follows the mechanism. Sampling exclusion calls for revised recruitment, support, and justified weighting. Coding erasure calls for a plural codebook, retained residual category, source-linked audit, or minority report. Interpretive foreclosure calls for an uptake record, reasons, reply, and revision path. A precommitted policy decision calls for scrutiny of use, mandate, and institutional good faith. Material burdens call for consequence repair. Generic additional consultation can intensify labor while leaving downstream gates intact.

The case supports the proposed framework if the stage audit prevents a false inference from attendance to influence and redirects intervention from repeated testimony toward coding, uptake, use, or consequence. It also illustrates a wider claim: democratic participation requires a transmission design connecting voice to identifiable decision powers.

Archive Loss and Institutional Capacity

This subsection distinguishes harmful loss, injustice, culpability, and prospective responsibility. A flood destroys a local archive that met reasonable preservation standards under scarce resources. The collection documented a language, community practice, and long history of local testimony. A national institution possessed technical capacity for distributed backups, yet had limited knowledge of the collection and stood outside an established support programme.

The co-experience object extends beyond the physical records. It includes relations among record creators, community custodians, descriptive practices, language competence, and successor users. Destruction can therefore affect all four continuity dimensions. Object continuity declines through lost traces. Participant linkage becomes difficult to reconstruct. Authority can shift toward distant institutions that hold surviving copies. Generative conditions can weaken when teaching materials, trusted custody, or local access disappear.

The destruction can constitute severe epistemic harm. An injustice finding depends on further history and norms, including persistent infrastructure inequality, discriminatory public investment, breached commitments, or patterns through which some communities receive weaker preservation capacity. Local culpability can receive little support where reasonable care was exercised. The national institution’s forward-looking responsibility can increase after the loss because knowledge, power, coordination capacity, and recurrence risk have changed. Its backward-looking answerability remains a separate inquiry.

Young’s social-connection approach supports attention to present power and collective capacity under structural conditions (Young 2011). Walker’s relational account of repair directs attention to acknowledgment, trust, and damaged relations alongside material restoration (Walker 2006). A backup grant alone can improve persistence while leaving local custody, language capacity, or authority unresolved. A fuller response may combine infrastructure, community-controlled copies, training, metadata repair, recognition of earlier neglect where warranted, and ongoing governance.

The case also tests the framework’s restraint. A natural event establishes loss and leaves injustice open. Scarcity supports an excuse only through an assessment of its distribution and history. Present remedy capacity grounds forward-looking responsibility while leaving past culpability open. Each judgment needs its own bridge record.

Table [tab:cases] summarizes the four reconstructions. The comparison shows the proposal at its strongest when similar language about voice, loss, or exclusion conceals different objects and mechanisms.

@p0.18p0.18Y Y@ Case & Operative stage & Principal bridge question & Mechanism-relevant response
Recommendation letter & symbolization, interpretation, use & role differentiation, factual duty, bias, and procedural fairness & factual verification, contextual reply, alternative evidence, appeal
Oral-history archive & formation, symbolization, preservation, circulation & consent scope, collaborative relation, source authority, and later-use risk & governed access, provenance, clarification channel, review
Consultation report & selection, symbolization, interpretation, use & representative procedure, uptake, promise, domination, and consequence & recruitment redesign, auditable coding, minority report, reasons, appeal
Archive loss & preservation, consequence, repair & reasonable care, structural distribution, public role, and remedy capacity & resilient infrastructure, capacity support, priority review, monitoring

Objections and Revision Boundaries

This section subjects the proposal to conceptual, normative, formal, and practical objections. Each response supplies a revision condition and leaves final defense open.

Antecedent Coverage

This subsection addresses the possibility that established theories already perform the paper’s work. Epistemic-injustice theory covers credibility and intelligibility; silencing and oppression accounts cover exchange and exclusion; situated and decolonial approaches cover position and authority; structural-responsibility theory covers distributed implication and repair; professional frameworks cover record practice.

The stage-discrimination condition in Section 3 governs the response. The term should contract into these antecedents whenever typed stages and bridge records produce identical warranted conclusions. A systematic, multilingual review remains necessary, especially across Black feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, disability, non-Western, archival, and participatory traditions.

Reification of Co-Experience

This subsection addresses the risk that the central category presents a heterogeneous relation as a unified subject. Shared settings can contain divergent experiences, unequal participation, conflict, strategic silence, and exclusion.

The relational-origin thesis attaches to a declared feature and an evidenced configuration. Group unity and collective mentality remain separate questions. An application should identify participants, absent parties, internal differences, relation types, temporal boundaries, and the counterfactual or constitutive evidence for dependence. Mixed sources should remain decomposed where possible. The category should be withdrawn from a case when ordinary individual testimony, aggregation, or institutional production explains the target equally well.

Taxonomic Proliferation

This subsection evaluates the cost of an eight-coordinate status profile. Additional coordinates can create clerical detail while leaving judgment unchanged.

Each coordinate earns retention through a difference in ground, evidence, uncertainty, or response. Harm and wrong can diverge; structural injustice and individual culpability can diverge; institutional answerability and forward-looking capacity can diverge; legal liability adds jurisdictional elements. An application that supplies identical grounds and remedies across two coordinates has a reason to merge them. The vector remains a revisable diagnostic.

Normative Formalism

This subsection addresses the risk that mathematical notation gives contested judgments an appearance of measurement or objectivity. The ternary values in Eq. [eq:status] can conceal disagreements about standards and evidence.

The bridge record in Eq. [eq:bridge] is mandatory for every resolved coordinate. Equations organize claims and make missing premises visible. Injustice requires a normative bridge beyond agency asymmetry; culpability requires additional actor-specific premises; liability requires jurisdiction-specific legal elements. Qualitative case dossiers may be epistemically superior to numerical scores. Formalization should be removed where it obscures the reasoning it was designed to expose.

Participant Authority and External Criticism

This subsection examines conflict among source participation, experiential standing, expertise, factual evidence, and public criticism. Participant groups can contain disagreement, hierarchy, exclusion, and changing views. External critics can identify error or domination and can also reproduce ignorance or appropriation.

The plural-standing profile supports scoped authority and contestable procedures. Participants can hold strong authority over consent, first-person effects, or community-governed materials while truth claims remain open to evidence and criticism. Experts can receive domain-specific weight while their mandates, conflicts, and uptake practices remain reviewable. The framework offers a grammar for these conflicts and leaves substantive resolution to domain norms and evidence.

Institutional Paternalism

This subsection evaluates expertise and stewardship as possible rationalizations for exclusion. An institution can cite professional judgment while preserving its own interpretive monopoly.

A defensible authority assignment should state purpose, scope, evidence, mandate, reasons, contestability, and revision. The institutional environment profile in Eq. [eq:environment] also tracks whether participants possess access, voice, contestability, revision capacity, benefit reach, and protection from burden. Strong expertise with weak accountability signals a governance problem requiring further assessment.

Stage Boundaries and Feedback

This subsection addresses the simplification created by discrete stages. Formation and interpretation can occur together; circulation can reshape meaning; consequence can change future formation; repair can become a new source of exclusion.

Equation [eq:trajectory] is a readable projection. Applications should replace it with a directed graph or process model when feedback changes the causal analysis. Stage labels identify operations, and their chronology can overlap. Sensitivity analysis should test alternative boundaries and actor assignments.

Disclosure Pressure

This subsection examines the risk that condition-bearing preservation creates pressure toward surveillance or unrestricted access. Rich provenance can expose vulnerable people, sacred knowledge, confidential testimony, or future targets of discrimination.

The access policy in Eq. [eq:access] separates discovery, viewing, quotation, revision, reuse, training, return, and deletion. Restrictions can be transparent in basis and review procedure while protected content remains governed. CARE, OHA, and SAA principles provide domain precedents for authority, relationship, consent, responsibility, and culturally sensitive access (Carroll et al. 2020; Oral History Association 2018; Society of American Archivists 2025).

Information-Theoretic Modesty

This subsection evaluates the trace-only theorem’s limited novelty. The proof follows directly from indistinguishable inputs and distinct targets.

Its contribution is architectural. It marks a precise boundary between later interpretation and source recovery, identifies the function of auxiliary records, and constrains claims about repair through wider dissemination of the same trace. A normative verdict requires additional premises. An empirical case must identify the target feature, collision, stakes, and feasible auxiliary channels.

Research Obligations and Future Direction

This section converts the framework’s open conditions into a research programme. The obligations cover conceptual comparison, case evidence, formal refinement, participatory governance, and domain-specific validation.

1. Scope validation. Develop criteria and counterexamples for distinguishing relationally formed knowledge from co-presence, aggregated reports, ordinary testimony, and institutionally produced categories.

2. Systematic genealogy. Extend the verified pass across Black feminist, standpoint, decolonial, and Indigenous traditions. Include disability, non-Western, participatory, archival, and information ethics scholarship.

3. Stage-discrimination studies. Compare the full framework with strong applications of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, silencing, epistemic oppression, structural responsibility, and domain codes.

4. Documented case dossiers. Reconstruct actors, objects, stages, decisions, evidence, consequences, and repair attempts from accessible records.

5. Participatory validation. Invite affected participants and relevant communities to challenge stage boundaries, standing assignments, terminology, bridge norms, and remedy burdens.

6. Standing-conflict protocols. Develop procedures for conflicts among affectedness, experience, expertise, representation, custody, and public mandate.

7. Bridge transparency. Require case analyses to publish the object, party, stage, norm, evidence, defeaters, uncertainty, and remedy relation for each classification.

8. Responsibility allocation. Compare role-, capacity-, benefit-, contribution-, social-connection-, and agency-based accounts across individual and institutional levels.

9. Repair evaluation. Test mechanism reach, beneficiary effects, labor burdens, consent, recurrence, displacement, and revision over time.

10. Information-loss studies. Identify target-relevant collisions under real selection and symbolization processes and evaluate governed auxiliary channels.

11. Preservation governance. Operationalize persistence, traceability, revisability, and regenerability together with privacy, safety, cultural restriction, and finite resources.

12. Jurisdictional legal passes. Analyse liability only within a specified jurisdiction, doctrine, procedure, evidential record, and remedy system.

13. Framework retirement. Merge, narrow, or abandon components that fail to improve discrimination beyond established theory or responsible practice.

Table [tab:programme] organizes these obligations as successive evidence gates. The order begins with comparative and participatory scrutiny before quantitative operationalization.

@p0.13p0.23Y Y@ Gate & Research object & Required output & Revision trigger
G1 & scope and genealogy & category criteria plus systematic map of overlap, difference, and omission & established accounts provide equivalent explanatory coverage
G2 & documented cases & relational-dependence, stage, actor, object, and evidence dossiers & stage localization remains arbitrary
G3 & participant review & recorded disagreements and revised standing assignments & framework reproduces extraction or erasure
G4 & bridge evaluation & explicit norms, scope, evidence, and defeaters & classifications depend on concealed premises
G5 & remedy comparison & mechanism reach, burden, recurrence, and alternatives & stage model yields the same response choice
G6 & longitudinal assessment & preservation, revision, consequence, and repair trajectories & short-term gains create durable displacement
G7 & domain extension & archive, policy, education, culture, language, or AI protocol & general categories flatten domain authority

Three research directions deserve early priority. First, community consultation offers accessible process records and clear downstream decisions. Second, oral history connects collaborative formation with preservation and later use under developed professional ethics. Third, AI-mediated summarization introduces a trace transformation whose collisions, provenance, revision paths, and institutional uptake can be tested. Each domain requires its own evidence and governance.

Conclusion

This section consolidates the co-experience-specific position, literature boundary, formal results, and revision conditions. It proceeds from relational genesis through selective portability to standing, responsibility, preservation, and repair.

The paper begins from a limited claim: some knowledge arises partly through configurations of interaction, practice, history, concepts, and material conditions. Transmission gives such knowledge extended reach by producing selective successor forms. These forms can carry content across time and audience while changing participant linkage, interpretive authority, and future generative conditions. Successful transmission therefore requires a declared target and a plural continuity assessment.

The philosophical contribution consists in relating four separations. Object continuity, participant linkage, authority continuity, and generative-condition continuity answer different questions. Source participation, affectedness, experiential position, expertise, mandate, custody, and institutional role ground different forms of standing. Transformation, harm, wrong, injustice, culpability, institutional answerability, forward-looking repair responsibility, and legal liability require distinct warrants. Correction of a trace, restoration of standing, procedural reform, consequence redress, and generative repair produce distinct achievements.

The literature establishes a demanding boundary. Testimony theory, epistemic-injustice scholarship, situated and decolonial inquiry, boundary-object and classification studies, histories of silencing, archival ethics, oral-history practice, Indigenous data sovereignty, structural responsibility, and moral repair already address the paper’s central concerns. The local term transmission justice earns retention when the joined analysis of relational source, stage, continuity, bridge, and remedy improves a warranted diagnosis relative to strong uses of those traditions.

The formal contribution remains subordinate to this argument. The typed trajectory distinguishes heterogeneous objects and operations. Target-specific comparison maps expose the dependence of fidelity on a declared feature. The four-coordinate profile preserves plural continuity. Agency and standing vectors prevent source participation from silently becoming downstream authority. The layered status profile keeps normative and responsibility judgments attached to separate evidence. The trace-only non-recovery proposition establishes the precise limit of reconstructing an erased distinction from the same trace, while auxiliary channels restore possible discrimination under further epistemic and governance conditions.

The cases illustrate both promise and restraint. Recommendation letters require role differentiation and procedural safeguards. Oral-history archives require collaborative, archival, and access-sensitive analysis across a long temporal route. Consultation reports require scrutiny of classification and uptake beyond attendance. Archive loss requires separation of harm, injustice, culpability, answerability, and present repair capacity. Each case changes the relevant response when its mechanism is localized.

The resulting position is provisional. Systematic genealogy, evidence for relational dependence, documented trajectories, participant and community scrutiny, transparent bridge records, and longitudinal repair evaluation will determine the framework’s future scope. Conceptual consolidation remains appropriate wherever established approaches provide equal or stronger guidance.

Acknowledgments

The paper developed through an extended dialogue between the author and OpenAI Codex concerning co-experience knowledge, transmission stages, interpretive power, epistemic injustice, responsibility, formal representation, and inferential restraint. The author is responsible for the resulting definitions, constructions, taxonomy, argument, citations, conclusions, and errors. The author welcomes critical engagement and independent development of the questions raised here.

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