From Stipulation to Claim: Foundations for an Alternative Demarcation

This work proposes an alternative to trust me bro as the basis for validating knowledge claims — not access to certainty, which no criterion of validation has ever supplied, but a demarcation built on three intersubjectively accessible criteria: intelligibility, consistency, and empirical accessibility. Unlike frameworks that begin directly with validation criteria, this text first establishes what a claim is, tracing phenomena through stipulation to claim and showing that no classification — concept, claim, sense, truth — is discovered rather than imported by a subject from outside it. It then establishes what licenses anyone to prescribe these criteria to others, arguing, after Hume, that no such license exists without a value already held. Only then are the criteria themselves introduced, developed, and applied. The proposal engages directly with Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Wittgenstein, Laudan, Saussure, Duhem, Sellars, and Reichenbach at the specific points where it touches problems each of them faced, correcting or diverging from each rather than surveying their positions. The result is offered explicitly as one demarcation among the known ones — arbitrary in the precise sense of chosen rather than discovered, defended by what it accomplishes rather than by any claim to finality, and leaving several points deliberately unresolved: the path-dependence of the pool against which consistency is tested, the permanent inaccessibility of the fact itself to any of the three empirical pathways, and the criteria's own exclusion, by design, of certain true claims no criterion of this kind was ever built to reach.