Epistemic IR as the Missing Meta-Tool

Knowledge systems do more than store propositions. They decide what may count as a claim, which evidence may support it, whose judgment may alter its standing, when uncertainty requires deferment, and how decisions can be contested or revised. Those governance commitments are usually distributed across prose, software, institutional practice, standards, and tacit authority. This paper develops Epistemic Intermediate Representation (Epistemic IR) as a candidate representation profile for making that machinery explicit. An Epistemic IR artifact binds an exact claim to its interpretation, scope, epistemic posture, standing, provenance, evidence, applicable standards, authority dependencies, adjudication state, contest history, and revision lineage. An external, versioned admission regime may evaluate the artifact and emit a bounded decision receipt. The representation does not decide truth, manufacture authority, or make a receipt self-validating. Corpus-wide comparison produces an important compression. MCIR already proposes a canonical intermediate representation for governed transformation. Constitutional Epistemics, Epistemic Authority Governance, Epistemic Situational Awareness, Admissibility Engineering, reasoning receipts, and the Governed Knowledge Loop already supply much of the governance machinery. Epistemic IR should therefore remain a candidate epistemic profile of MCIR unless it demonstrates semantics or conformance obligations that the general representation cannot express. Its strongest present contribution is not another foundational substrate, but a portable claim-governance profile that makes admission, refusal, deferment, contest, and revision inspectable without confusing procedural standing with truth.