Epistemic Triangle
“I propose the Epistemic Triangle model, which explains how observability determines whether prior-dominated or signal-dominated reasoning prevails, producing qualitatively different failure modes.”
— Coherent Without Grounding, Grounded Without Success (2026), §1.5
Why it matters
The Epistemic Triangle is the structural account of why the coherence-grounding inversion happens. It supplies the mechanism that makes the paradox explanatory rather than merely descriptive, and yields the tripartite framework—coherence, grounding, basing relation—required to evaluate artificial epistemic agents without conflating them.
Notes
The triangle’s three vertices distribute the load of epistemic competence across distinct sources: training-time priors (compressed regularities from data), inference-time signals (features the agent can read from the observable environment), and domain knowledge (the conceptual scaffolding that licenses inference from one to the other).
When the Observability Gap is large, signals are weak and the system falls back on priors—producing coherent explanations that need not track the actual causal structure. When the gap is small, signals dominate and explanations track structure, but the basing relation between explanation and intervention can still fail. The triangle thus accounts for both Type A (Coherent Without Grounding) and Type B (Grounded Without Success) within a single model.