NOESIS: On Epistemic Stability, Regime Deviation, and the Limits of Post-Hoc Truth

This document presents the canonical conceptual articulation of Noesis Phase I: a framework for understanding failures in generative systems through the lens of epistemic stability and regime deviation, rather than post-hoc content accuracy. It argues that behaviors commonly described as hallucination or misinformation are surface-level artifacts of deeper epistemic regime failures—specifically, transitions from stable inference regimes into degraded or narrative-dominant regimes that preserve fluency and confidence while losing grounding. The document introduces epistemic stability as a first-class property of generative systems, distinct from accuracy, alignment, or compliance, and outlines why content-level detection and correction strategies are structurally insufficient without internal observability. This work is conceptual in nature. It does not propose tools, implementations, or policy prescriptions. Its purpose is to establish a precise ontological framing intended to support future instrumentation, measurement, and governance efforts grounded in cognitive telemetry rather than output evaluation alone. This version constitutes the canonical text of Phase I of Noesis. Subsequent elaborations and implementations derive from, but do not supersede, the framing established here.