Upholding Epistemic Agency: A Brouwerian Assertibility Constraint for Responsible AI

TL;DR

This paper proposes a Brouwer-inspired assertibility constraint for responsible AI, ensuring systems can only assert claims with publicly inspectable certificates, thereby preserving epistemic agency in high-stakes domains.

Contribution

It introduces a three-status interface semantics and operationalizes the constraint through decision-layer gating and reason-coded abstentions to uphold responsible AI practices.

Findings

The semantics separate internal entitlement from public standing.

The operationalization uses internal witnesses and output contracts.

Undetermined is a mandatory status when no adequate witness exists.

Abstract

Generative AI can convert uncertainty into hypersuasive, authoritative-seeming verdicts, displacing the justificatory work on which democratic epistemic agency depends. As a corrective, I propose a Brouwer-inspired assertibility constraint for responsible AI: in high-stakes domains, systems may assert or deny claims only if they can provide a publicly inspectable and contestable certificate of entitlement; otherwise they must return Undetermined. This constraint yields a three-status interface semantics (Asserted, Denied, Undetermined) in which statuses mark entitlement to categorical speech rather than truth values of the underlying world-claim. The semantics cleanly separates internal entitlement from public standing while connecting them via the certificate as a boundary object. It also produces a time-indexed entitlement profile that is stable under numerical refinement yet revisable as the public record changes. I operationalize the constraint through decision-layer gating of threshold and argmax outputs, using internal witnesses (e.g., sound bounds or separation margins) and an output contract with reason-coded abstentions. A design lemma shows that any total, certificate-sound binary interface already decides the deployed predicate on its declared scope, so Undetermined is not a tunable reject option but a mandatory status whenever no adequate forcing witness is available. By making outputs answerable to challengeable warrants rather than confidence alone, the paper aims to preserve epistemic agency against the hypersuasive pull of automated speech in public justification.