Conceptual Misalignment in XAI

This paper argues that the prevailing XAI paradigm suffers not from technical limitations but from a profound philosophical misconception: the assumption that explanation is primarily about transparency. We argue that the development of useful explanation is not fundamentally a question of information transfer, but of epistemic parity. Through a case of harbor monitoring we show that stakeholders are indeed conceptually misaligned; however, these misalignments ultimately reflect underlying conflicts between domain-specific assumptions and authority claims. We call for replacing transparency-focused XAI with a new paradigm of Domain Authority Negotiation (DAN) that explicitly acknowledges explanation as a contestation of epistemic power rather than a mechanism of revelation.