When Can an Agent Attribute Properties to Itself? A Typed Account of Identity, Integrity, and Freedom

An agent that reports on itself may be right, may be wrong, may lack the evidence to say - or may lack the internal structure that would make the report mean anything at all. We separate the third case from the fourth. An agent-relative property is typable when the structures its evaluation quantifies over are present in the agent's architecture; only a typable property has a verdict to be uncertain about. This is a typed integration interface applied to self-attribution; it is not a new free logic, not a new logic of de se, and not a new awareness logic. The paper's contributions are four. C1 - a typed account of self-attribution resting on three requirements (representational typability, information sufficiency, temporal certification) with an explicit dependency between them. C2 - a representational-extension result: adding a single structure can move a self-property from untypable to typed with world and evidence unchanged, a transition in the architecture alone (prop:repext). C3 - a reflexive-attribution result: the additional condition required for "r has property p" to become "I have property p" is a self-reference in the extended domain, distinct from computational reflection (cor:refl-attr). C4 - a comparative Identity / Integrity / Freedom witness family: three worked instances demonstrating that different selected self-properties can require different representational and informational support. A bounded remark connects the temporal axis to a refinement-confirmation certification layer (Bragetti, Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.22028019) for attribution-support stabilisation under FG-persistence. --- SCOPE AND STATUS. This is a preprint. It has not been peer reviewed and is not under journal acceptance.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-08-21
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22050704
Primary Topic
Philosophy and Theoretical Science
Type
preprint
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preprint

When Can an Agent Attribute Properties to Itself? A Typed Account of Identity, Integrity, and Freedom

Giuseppe Francesco Italiano, Davide Bragetti
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Philosophy and Theoretical Science
preprint

When Can an Agent Attribute Properties to Itself? A Typed Account of Identity, Integrity, and Freedom

Giuseppe Francesco Italiano, Davide Bragetti
preprint en

Abstract

An agent that reports on itself may be right, may be wrong, may lack the evidence to say - or may lack the internal structure that would make the report mean anything at all. We separate the third case from the fourth. An agent-relative property is typable when the structures its evaluation quantifies over are present in the agent's architecture; only a typable property has a verdict to be uncertain about. This is a typed integration interface applied to self-attribution; it is not a new free logic, not a new logic of de se, and not a new awareness logic. The paper's contributions are four. C1 - a typed account of self-attribution resting on three requirements (representational typability, information sufficiency, temporal certification) with an explicit dependency between them. C2 - a representational-extension result: adding a single structure can move a self-property from untypable to typed with world and evidence unchanged, a transition in the architecture alone (prop:repext). C3 - a reflexive-attribution result: the additional condition required for "r has property p" to become "I have property p" is a self-reference in the extended domain, distinct from computational reflection (cor:refl-attr). C4 - a comparative Identity / Integrity / Freedom witness family: three worked instances demonstrating that different selected self-properties can require different representational and informational support. A bounded remark connects the temporal axis to a refinement-confirmation certification layer (Bragetti, Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.22028019) for attribution-support stabilisation under FG-persistence. --- SCOPE AND STATUS. This is a preprint. It has not been peer reviewed and is not under journal acceptance.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (IT), Sapienza University of Rome (IT)
Peace, Justice and strong institutions
Philosophy and Theoretical Science
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When Can an Agent Attribute Properties to Itself? A Typed Account of Identity, Integrity, and Freedom — Giuseppe Francesco Italiano, Davide Bragetti · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS