Transcendence as an Operator and the Witness as its Mechanism. An extension of the DIKW hierarchy for auditable machine-assisted inquiry

The Data–Information–Knowledge–Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy describes as-cent within a fixed base of data. It is silent on where the base comes from, on what happenswhen the phenomenon under study has no category in the base, and on what lies abovejudgement. This paper reports an extension developed in the course of two decades ofapplied knowledge-structuring work in Kazakhstan and formalised in the OmniCore pro-gramme: DIKWT, in which T is not a fifth stratum but an operator T : W → D′ that returnsa sustained judgement to the base as new data. The operator has a falsifiable firing crite-rion — the composition of the data layer must change — which separates it from rhetoricalappeals to paradigm shift. We then argue that the operator is inert without a dedicatednode, the Witness (Sanskrit sākṣī), defined by prohibition: it may not produce content,and its only outputs are a traceable record of what each assertion stands on and a rankedregistry of dangling edges, that is, assertions resting on a basis absent from the system. Theregistry is the practical specification of what new data must be acquired; it is thereforethe mechanism by which T is realised rather than merely invoked. We assess the signifi-cance of this construction for two documented failure modes of machine-assisted inquiry:multi-turn drift of large language models, and degenerate consensus in multi-agent delib-eration. We give an explicit novelty assessment against the DIKW critique literature andagainst purpose-extended variants such as DIKWP, state which of our claims are estab-lished, modelled or hypothetical, and specify what evidence would refute each of them.A preregisterable ablation protocol for empirical evaluation is included.