Justificatory Reconstruction Cost (R)
“Let R(Kt) denote the justificatory reconstruction cost: the cognitive and temporal effort required for a human collective H to reconstruct, from the available code and ancillary artifacts, a justificatory state satisfying J(H, Kt) ≥ τ.”
— Code Structure Evolution (2026), §3
Why it matters
R converts an epistemic condition (the loss of justificatory continuity) into a cost function whose growth pattern can be analyzed. The CSE thesis is that R grows combinatorially rather than additively under ungrounded modification—a claim that formally underwrites the inevitability of the epistemic point of no return.
Notes
The combinatorial form of R growth is the load-bearing claim of the CSE framework. Modifications interact with one another: a single ungrounded edit may add a structural relation that the artifact itself records imperfectly, but the burden of reconstructing that relation depends on the surrounding context, which in turn depends on every other ungrounded edit. The interactions, not just the edits, must be retrospectively justified.
R stands opposed to the replacement cost W: when R(Ktk) > W(Ktk), the epistemic point of no return has been crossed. This formalises the intuition that “rewriting from scratch” sometimes becomes the only rationally defensible option.