The Dual-Purpose Criterion: An Operationalisation of Epistemic Recursion for Small Research Groups. Methodological article

This paper addresses the systematic loss of resilience and the attrition of researchinitiatives in small scientific groups operating under severe resource constraints. As asolution it proposes the dual-purpose criterion, an operationalisation of the principle ofcare for epistemic connectedness (Sorge) — the second component of the concept ofEpistemic Recursion. The author advances a cost model specifying a condition ofdeterministic degradation for actions that serve a single purpose (accumulation "for thefuture"). It is shown that, for any finite resource and any cost function monotonicallyincreasing in both time and volume, a late attempt to restore connectedness exceeds thegroup's resource limit, making the destruction of the ontology unavoidable; the resultdoes not depend on the particular form of the cost function. The criterion is set againstestablished results in the knowledge-management literature — the systematicdivergence between the requirements of the producer and the consumer of knowledge inrepositories, and the independence of counterproductive knowledge behaviour from thepresence of KM tooling — and against the concept of technical debt. A case ofindependent confirmation of all three anti-patterns described is reported from an audit ofa production knowledge-verification pipeline. The proposed criterion applies to any smallresearch group engaged in cumulative knowledge work in a digital environment