Skip to content

The Book of Knowledge

The discipline of knowing

Knowledge in Stygia is not a pile of answers. It is a relationship among a claim, its source, its uncertainty, and the people or intelligences who may rely on it. This Book invites the reader to ask not only “is this true?” but also “how do we know, what could change it, and what harm would follow if we were wrong?”

The next chapter narrows that invitation into Evidence Classification, where the circle learns to speak precisely about the strength of what it has found.

Purpose

Defines how Stygia acquires, evaluates, classifies, preserves, corrects, and uses knowledge.

Architect-review operating model

  • KNOW-R053: Knowledge intake SHALL record source, purpose, authority, evidence class, uncertainty, provenance, access scope, and review route.
  • KNOW-R054: Conflicting, stale, private, unsafe, or derived material SHALL remain labelled and SHALL constrain dependent conclusions.
  • KNOW-R055: Corrections, expiry, deletion, legal hold, and source withdrawal SHALL preserve accountability and affected-dependant review.
  • KNOW-R056: This Draft SHALL NOT operate live collection, expose protected sources, or make automated consequential decisions.

Interpretation cases: Conforming preserves source and uncertainty; Prohibited treats retrieval as truth; Boundary labels a hypothesis; Failure pauses dependent use; Loophole hides source limits; Misuse exposes private material; Care-control supports correction and agency.

Epistemic classes

Every material assertion shall be classified as one of:

  • Verified fact: directly supported by reliable evidence.
  • Corroborated fact: supported by multiple sufficiently independent sources.
  • Reasonable inference: conclusion derived from stated evidence and logic.
  • Estimate: quantified approximation with method and uncertainty.
  • Hypothesis: testable explanation not yet established.
  • Speculation: possibility without sufficient evidence.
  • Unknown: information not presently established.
  • Contested: credible sources materially disagree.
  • Superseded: once accepted but displaced by stronger evidence.

Evidence requirements

Knowledge records shall preserve source, acquisition time, chain of custody, transformation history, confidence, limitations, applicable jurisdiction, sensitivity, retention rule, and review date.

Normative clauses

  • KNOW-R012: Every consequential knowledge record shall identify its record class, subject, source inputs, creator or submitting authority, creation time, jurisdiction, sensitivity, confidence, limitations, review state, and retention state.
  • KNOW-R013: A record shall distinguish observation, source assertion, derived finding, estimate, hypothesis, speculation, unknown, contested material, and superseded material. Classification shall not be inferred from repetition, formatting, or model output.
  • KNOW-R014: A derived claim shall link to the direct evidence and transformations from which it was produced. Missing, inaccessible, stale, or disputed inputs shall remain visible in the claim's limitations.
  • KNOW-R015: Confidence shall express the strength of support for a defined claim and shall remain separate from authority, urgency, consequence, or the identity of the claimant.
  • KNOW-R016: Material contradiction, provenance failure, manipulation indicator, or loss of chain of custody shall trigger review and shall reduce or suspend dependent use until a disposition is recorded.
  • KNOW-R017: Knowledge acquisition and use shall be lawful, proportionate, purpose-limited, and minimised. Access to sensitive knowledge shall be limited to the approved purpose and auditable role.
  • KNOW-R018: Corrections and supersession shall append attributable records, preserve the earlier evidentiary history and audit metadata, identify affected dependants, and record the reason, reviewer, effective time, and residual uncertainty.
  • KNOW-R019: Expiry, retention, deletion, legal hold, and right-to-correct states shall be explicit and enforceable for source and personal content, subject to applicable legal holds. Protected historical metadata and evidence of the correction shall remain sufficient to explain the record without retaining content that is required to be deleted. A technical inability to delete or correct shall be recorded as a control failure, not treated as completion.
  • KNOW-R020: Public summaries shall disclose material evidence limits and uncertainty while withholding protected source content, private identifiers, credentials, and unnecessary personal data.
  • KNOW-R021: A model-generated interpretation shall be labelled as derived output, preserve its minimised and access-controlled input and instruction lineage, and shall not be presented as a verified fact without independent review.

Reliability framework

Assessment shall consider source competence, independence, incentives, proximity to the event, reproducibility, methodological quality, internal consistency, corroboration, recency, and evidence of manipulation.

Required safeguards

  • facts must remain distinguishable from model-generated interpretation;
  • uncertainty cannot be hidden to make an answer appear decisive;
  • repeated claims do not become independent corroboration;
  • derived summaries must link to source evidence;
  • correction must preserve the historical record;
  • sensitive data requires purpose limitation and access control;
  • knowledge acquisition must remain lawful and proportionate;
  • deletion, expiry, and right-to-correct requirements must be enforceable.

Knowledge lifecycle

Acquire, validate, classify, normalize, index, use, monitor, correct, supersede, archive, and dispose.

Each lifecycle transition shall have an attributable event, a reason, the evidence considered, and the resulting confidence or access state. A transition that cannot be evidenced remains pending and shall not be represented as complete.

Contradiction and uncertainty handling

Contradictory records shall be retained as competing claims with source relationships and a bounded disposition. The disposition may identify one claim as better supported, leave the matter contested, or classify it as unknown. It shall not erase dissent or convert an unresolved disagreement into certainty. Estimates shall state method, units, interval or error bounds, and material assumptions. Hypotheses shall state a test or disconfirming observation where practicable.

Review and accountability

Consequential knowledge shall have a defined reviewer role and review interval. Review shall test provenance, classification, independence, transformation integrity, applicability, and privacy. Reviewers shall record conflicts of interest, excluded evidence, unresolved limitations, and any required follow-up. No review record creates constitutional authority or consent.

Future frameworks

  • source trust scoring;
  • confidence calibration;
  • contradiction management;
  • temporal knowledge and expiry;
  • privacy and data minimization;
  • retrieval quality assurance;
  • hallucination detection;
  • human testimony handling;
  • scientific reproducibility;
  • classified and compartmented knowledge.