The Epistemic Discontinuity: Why Record Tampering Dissolves the Ground of Delegated Authority

This paper argues that auditability—the existence of an evidential base against which thecorrectness of a delegate’s exercise can be assessed—is a constitutive condition of delegatedepistemic authority, not merely a useful safeguard. The major accounts of epistemic authority(Zagzebski, Goldman, Faulkner, Anderson, O’Neill) universally presuppose this condition butnone asserts it as constitutive. Making the condition explicit yields two results. First, theDissolution Proposition: when a delegated authority irreversibly falsifies or deletes the recordsof its own exercise, the premise on which delegation rested—verifiable correctness—dissolvesas an analytic consequence, not as a normative sanction. Second, the Discontinuity Proposition:biased reporting and record tampering, though adjacent in practice, are separated by acategorical epistemic gap. Biased reporting distorts the message layer while leaving theevidential base intact; record tampering destroys the base layer, foreclosing all correctivemechanisms in principle and co-opting the epistemic virtue of honest reporting as a propagationmechanism for the corruption. The cost function is discontinuous at the boundary between thetwo layers. The paper further shows that tampering dominates all other abuses of delegatedauthority: it is the only act that destroys the system’s capacity for error-correction as such,rendering all other wrongs uncorrectable.