The Missing Science: Warning Failure, Endogenous Assessment, and the Case for a Theory of Institutional Self-Knowledge

The historical record contains a regularity that has never received a theory: societies, institutions, and organisations that failed almost always saw their failure coming. The warnings were present, accurate, widely held — and inert. This review argues that the regularity is not a collection of tragedies but a phenomenon; that its raw materials already exist, scattered across at least fifteen literatures that do not cite one another — from the collapse of targeted metrics and the oligarchisation of organisations to preference falsification, state legibility, normal accidents, groupthink, expert miscalibration, looping effects, clinical anosognosia, the audit society, strategic surprise, critical transitions, and financial instability; and that these literatures share a single structural object they have each glimpsed from one side: assessment conducted from inside the system being assessed. The literature on successful collective judgement is reviewed as the phenomenon's complement. From the fragments a specification is derived — nine requirements any adequate theory of institutional self-knowledge must satisfy, including a measurable position variable, a signed law of assessment error, a regime structure, an account of repair capture, dynamics, scale-generality with local constants, public falsifiability, and reflexive application to the theory itself. The review then argues that the science is urgent rather than merely absent, on two grounds: the closure of the planetary envelope, which removes the external renewal mechanism every prior recovery depended upon, and the reconstruction of humanity's assessment layer in artificial systems. It argues, against a long-standing verdict, that theory at this scale can be built to be executed in public, and describes the method. One candidate framework is presented against the specification — briefly, with its untested components and kill conditions stated, and with the author's conflict of interest declared. The review closes with the conditions under which its own central claim would be shown wrong. Note on the abstract convention: this paper's description intentionally does not open by naming Coupling Geometry. It is a review article whose argument is that the science is missing independent of any candidate; the framework enters late, in §6, with the author's conflict of interest declared. The convention's purpose — linking the Foundations DOI — is served here by the Related identifiers below rather than by an in-description hyperlink.