Glossary

The vocabulary of falsifiable governance

Precise definitions of the concepts behind FactNotebook and Governance Falsifiability Infrastructure. Each is formalized in the GFI paper; reuse them freely.

Governance Falsifiability Infrastructure (GFI): An architecture that makes governance claims observable, contradictable, and independently evidenced — producing CONFIRMED, CONTRADICTED, or NOT ASSESSABLE results for each claim — without the infrastructure itself holding governance authority. Its founding thesis: a governance claim that cannot be observed, contradicted, or independently evidenced is epistemically indistinguishable from the absence of that claim.
Evidence sovereignty: The ability to verify a governance claim yourself — from evidence that is independent of the system under review and re-verifiable by a third party — instead of importing a foreign certificate and taking it on faith. See the essay.
NOT ASSESSABLE: A structural property, not a failure mode. A governance claim cannot be evaluated when the observation channel required to falsify or corroborate it was unavailable at the time the claim became operational. Reporting NOT ASSESSABLE distinguishes absence of evidence from evidence of absence.
Contemporaneously bound: Evidence that is committed before the consequence it governs, ordered in a sequence its author cannot rewrite, and witnessed independently. It is the observable counterpart of Haber & Stornetta's "before-ness" (1991): a record sealed as governance, not assembled as narrative. See the essay.
Provenance ladder (A0–A5): A classification of how an evidence record was produced and recorded, assigned by explicit, non-normative rules — from A0 (no qualifying attributes) through A3 (timestamped, attributed, external origin) to A5 (immutable and externally attested). It is a category, not a ranking of value, and it is orthogonal to contemporaneity.
Decision Baseline: A sealed, timestamped artifact capturing the governance context active at the moment of a decision — the standard, policy version, and authorized approvers in force — independently of the decision's outcome. It is what makes re-auditability possible, and it is the governance equivalent of clinical-trial pre-registration.
Evidence validation vs Authority validation: Two distinct questions a governance claim must survive. Authority validation asks who is entitled to make this claim — the auditor, the certifier, the regulator. Evidence validation asks what observable, re-verifiable record supports it. Most governance products sell authority; FactNotebook supplies the evidence substrate beneath it. The two are complementary: an authority without evidence is an opinion, and evidence without an accountable authority is inert. FactNotebook never issues the authority's verdict — it makes that verdict demonstrated rather than declared.
Accountability Gap: The complete output of the Consistency Engine for a governance window: every CONTRADICTED result, every observable pattern against a declared standard, and every documented NOT ASSESSABLE condition. It is a structured, citable set — not a score.
Policy Pack: A versioned, attributed, declarative specification of which attributes and provenance classes are admissible for a governance decision under a given framework (EU AI Act, ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF, POPIA, internal). It carries the authority of its author, not of the system that evaluates it — which is what keeps the evidence layer framework-agnostic.
Velocity anomaly & rubber-stamp: A velocity anomaly is an observable pattern — for example, approvals consistently faster than a declared policy minimum. Rubber-stamp is the governance interpretation of that pattern. The evidence layer produces the first (descriptive, falsifiable); only an accountable authority produces the second.
Evidence validation vs Authority validation: Authority validation accepts a governance claim because of who asserts it — a certificate, an auditor's signature, a methodology. Evidence validation accepts it because the claim is observable, contradictable, and independently re-verifiable. The two are orthogonal: an authority's verdict becomes far more defensible when it rests on an evidence substrate. FactNotebook never carries authority — it produces the evidence beneath whoever does.
Observability Principle: A governance claim is assessable if and only if the observation channels required to falsify or corroborate it were active at the time the claim became operational. Deploying a governance requirement after the relevant channels were absent yields NOT ASSESSABLE for that period — a structural limit, not a deficiency.

Full architecture: Evidence Attributes as the Foundation of Governance Falsifiability · Research hub