Upholding Epistemic Agency: A Brouwerian Assertibility Constraint for Responsible AI
This addresses the issue of preserving epistemic agency for users in democratic contexts where AI outputs influence public justification, though it is incremental as it builds on existing philosophical and technical frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of generative AI making authoritative claims without justification, which undermines democratic epistemic agency, by proposing a Brouwer-inspired assertibility constraint that requires AI systems in high-stakes domains to provide publicly inspectable certificates for assertions or denials, otherwise returning 'Undetermined'.
Generative AI can convert uncertainty into authoritative-seeming verdicts, displacing the justificatory work on which democratic epistemic agency depends. As a corrective, I propose a Brouwer-inspired assertibility constraint for responsible AI: in high-stakes domains, systems may assert or deny claims only if they can provide a publicly inspectable and contestable certificate of entitlement; otherwise they must return "Undetermined". This constraint yields a three-status interface semantics (Asserted, Denied, Undetermined) that cleanly separates internal entitlement from public standing while connecting them via the certificate as a boundary object. It also produces a time-indexed entitlement profile that is stable under numerical refinement yet revisable as the public record changes. I operationalize the constraint through decision-layer gating of threshold and argmax outputs, using internal witnesses (e.g., sound bounds or separation margins) and an output contract with reason-coded abstentions. A design lemma shows that any total, certificate-sound binary interface already decides the deployed predicate on its declared scope, so "Undetermined" is not a tunable reject option but a mandatory status whenever no forcing witness is available. By making outputs answerable to challengeable warrants rather than confidence alone, the paper aims to preserve epistemic agency where automated speech enters public justification.