Ontology Laundering

Institutions depend on revisable semantic anchors: definitions, classifications, measures, precedents, evidentiary rules, and authority relations that connect claims to observation and consequence. Those anchors must change when evidence, conditions, or legitimate purposes change. They can also be changed in ways that preserve procedural legitimacy while concealing weakened correspondence, displaced accountability, or asymmetric advantage. This paper develops ontology laundering as a candidate diagnostic for the latter pattern. Ontology laundering is not every semantic change, mistaken definition, political disagreement, institutional failure, or disputed measurement. It is a materially consequential alteration of an interpretive system whose provenance, authority, evidentiary basis, consequences, or contestability are obscured in a way that makes a previously visible conflict appear resolved, admissible, or authoritative. The framework separates deliberate laundering from emergent drift, negligence, adaptive revision, and good-faith disagreement. It models an ontology version, a change event, and a multidimensional risk profile; provides tests for vocabulary drift, metric substitution, procedural displacement, model and statistical laundering, synthetic evidence, consensus closure, and legitimacy recursion; and identifies false-positive controls. The paper integrates Meaning as Binding, Semantic Debt, Governed Semantic Cartography, Authority Laundering Theory, Reasoning by Way of Receipts, Governance Coverage Gaps, the Governed Meaning Base, and the universal GSM. The result is a research and governance specification, not a finding that any named institution has engaged in laundering. No external case research was conducted. The framework requires exact change custody, competing explanations, asymmetric-effect analysis, contradiction channels, outcome evidence, and explicit limits before it can support a bounded diagnosis.