Truth and Epistemology

What is truth, and how do we know what we know?

The theory that governs everything below — ground truth, dependency hierarchy, epistemic uncertainty, and the distinction between data, information, and knowledge.

33 published articles

From Enabling Intelligence

Enabling Intelligence

Series preview — reasoning reliably from knowledge under uncertainty

From Synthesizing Knowledge

Synthesizing Knowledge

Series preview — how explicit information becomes something we can act on

From Towards Wisdom

Series preview — judgment infrastructure for organisations under uncertainty

From Genesis

Where Everything Breaks

Nine failures, one problem wearing nine costumes

Truth Doesn't Change

The axiom that everything else follows from

Capturing Truth — and the Schema-Evolution Myth

How truth gets into a system in the first place, and why doing it wrong shows up as schema churn

What the irreducible units of truth are — and why the most important ones go unrecorded

Ground truth proper — necessary and contingent — and why reality never waits for our axioms

Captured Evidence

Tier one — what the log can claim, and what it cannot

Four Capture Modes

Tier 1 contains only events

Thinking by Writing

Decision as emission — why humans and machines both reason in symbols, and why capture is not the same for each

The Moment of Commitment

Where derivations become decisions and accountability crystallises

But Commitment Is Not Enough

Authority, weight, and the difference between rank and standing

When Facts Are Wrong

Corrections, amendments, and compensating transactions

Every Statement Has a Tier

Tracking the strength of a claim is a commitment to truth, not a claim to certainty

The Epistemic Ladder

Fourteen levels from the Real to the refuted claim — and the rules for climbing honestly

Why Atomicity Matters

How far an artifact sits from the irreducible — and why that governs what may depend on it

Why Uncertainty Matters

How confidently an artifact reflects the truth — at the moment you actually use it

Disposition and Processor Fidelity

When the judge — not the evidence — distorts trust

The Facets Composed

Six orthogonal facets, one question: how much may I trust this?

What Information Theory Says

The formal underpinning of the facets

When the Commitment Boundary Needs Reinforcing

Severity, task nature, and who is affected

Strengthening the Commitment Boundary

Challenge, calibration, and independent review at the bind

We Already Decided

When holding course is rational — and why those cases are rare

Decision Principles and the Record

Seven irreducible rules, one log, and why honest decisions need both

Architectural Decision Records

Industry ADR, corpus (A)DR, and why hypothesis closure matters at bind

Enforcing Invariants Without Locks

Partition writes to single authorities — coordinate at routing, not at commit

Immutable Infrastructure

Why containers are a statement about truth

The Unified Theory

One problem. One axiom. Six facets. Zero coincidences.

What this opens — biases, dispositions, and AI in service of truth under uncertainty

Epilogue — The Python Detour

What a language comparison taught us about guarantees

From Modeling Truth

Before You Model

What Genesis established — synthesis with links, for readers new or returning

Domain Events Are Not CRUD

Storage verbs force interpretation where the log should speak plainly