---
slug: unreconciled_plural_witness_construction
name: Unreconciled Plural Witness Construction
one_liner: "Multiple observers each construct an internally coherent account of the same underlying reality, and the accounts remain mutually inconsistent and underdetermined by the testimony alone — no internal procedure adjudicates them without outside evidence."
type: prime
schema_version: 2
status: density_v2_draft
categories: [epistemic, social, cognitive]
origin_domain: epistemology
alternate_origin_domains: [law, philosophy_of_science, narrative_theory, perception]
aliases: [perspectival_underdetermination, conflicting_coherent_accounts, testimonial_irreconcilability, multi_vantage_construction, rashomon_structure]
related: []
solution_archetypes: []
review_flags:
- "OPERATOR-DERIVED (op-05 generalization) — the proposed GENUS of `rashomon_effect` (lift: strip the film/cultural-reference frame — the Kurosawa allusion and its specific crime-testimony setting — to expose the bare epistemic structure of plural internally-coherent accounts of one reality, unreconciled without external evidence). Discovered in the op-05 remaining-strata sweep 2026-07-03. Tier B candidate (COINAGE RISK — see keep/cut). STATUS: HOLD pending owner keep/cut."
- "Tier-B domain-instance / coinage flag (from data): Rashomon-genus absent from corpus; siblings span criminal-trial eyewitness conflicts, the blind-men-and-the-elephant parable, and peer reviewers reaching opposite verdicts on one manuscript — structurally distinct domains. Sibling-test passes, but the genus label is a proposer coinage, not an established named structure — treat with skepticism."
- "Created 2026-07-03; STUB ONLY (frontmatter + Core Idea + Notes). SI/SF/similarity are PROPOSER ESTIMATES pending triangulation. Body sections (Structural Signature onward) NOT written."
- "Phase-C action: re-similarity-check vs `rashomon_effect` (the input) and the named siblings, AND vs any existing underdetermination / perspectivism / observer-dependence / unreliable-signal prime; confirm it is a genuine genus (covers the input AND the testimony/elephant/peer-review siblings) and not a domain instance, a restatement of the input, or an alias of an existing underdetermination prime; draw a subsumption edge input→candidate + sibling edges at incorporation; sync one_liner to a v1 draft per CLAUDE.md before merge."
substrate_independence:
  composite_substrate_independence: 3
  domain_breadth: 4
  structural_abstraction: 3
  transfer_evidence: 3
  reasoning: 'The bare structure — several observers each build an internally coherent account of one underlying reality, the accounts conflict, and nothing internal to the testimony set adjudicates among them without external evidence — is genuinely cross-domain (law, science, perception, narrative) which supports domain breadth around 4. But structural abstraction is only mid-scale because the pattern is bound to a notion of observers, accounts, and construction — it presupposes representation-forming agents and carries epistemic content (coherence, truth, adjudication) rather than being a pure medium-neutral relation. It is closer to the framed end than the Tier-A candidates in this batch. Transfer is real (the siblings are unlike) but the genus is a coinage and overlaps a likely-existing underdetermination/perspectivism family, so transfer_evidence sits at 3. Composite 3: a mid-scale, partly-epistemically-framed abstraction.'
similarity_to_nearest_existing_prime:
  slug: rashomon_effect
  similarity: 0.66
structural_framed:
  label: framed
  aggregate: 0.52
  criteria: {vocab_travels: 0.5, evaluative_weight: 0.4, institutional_origin: 0.4, human_practice_bound: 0.7, import_vs_recognize: 0.6}
  rationale: 'The pattern carries epistemic content — it is about accounts, coherence, truth, and the impossibility of internal adjudication — and it presupposes representation-forming observers, which binds it to the human (or agent) practice of testimony, perception, and knowledge-construction. That pushes human_practice_bound and import_vs_recognize toward the framed end. Its vocabulary does travel (perspective, account, underdetermination appear in law, science, and perception), and the evaluative weight is moderate rather than maximal (it describes a predicament rather than prescribing), so it lands mid-scale at ~0.52 — genuinely framed but not heavily so. Note the tension with the SI estimate: broad in domain but epistemically framed in content.'
phase_b_passes_completed: []
---
# Unreconciled Plural Witness Construction

## Core Idea

Unreconciled plural witness construction is the epistemic pattern in which *multiple observers of the same underlying reality each construct an internally coherent account of it, the accounts are mutually inconsistent, and nothing internal to the set of accounts adjudicates among them — none can be promoted to ground truth without adding external evidence*. The single constraint stripped from the input `rashomon_effect` is its cultural-reference frame: the input is named for Kurosawa's film and carries the specific setting of conflicting crime testimony. This genus keeps the load-bearing epistemic skeleton — plural vantage-bound observers, each producing a self-consistent construction, jointly underdetermining the truth — and drops the film allusion and the crime-narrative setting. What remains is any situation of perspective-bound witnessing that yields coherent-but-conflicting accounts with no internal adjudication procedure.

The load-bearing anatomy has three parts. First, *plural vantage-bound observers*: several agents each observe the same reality from a different position, with different priors and different inferential machinery. Second, *internal coherence per account*: each observer's account is plausibly faithful *to that observer's vantage* — not a lie or a random error, but a self-consistent construction, which is what makes the conflict resistant. Third, *joint underdetermination with no internal adjudicator*: the accounts conflict, the testimony set as a whole does not determine which is correct, and there is no procedure *within* the accounts that can settle it — resolution requires importing external evidence or a privileged vantage. The characteristic payoff of recognizing the pattern is a warning against a specific error: it explains why collecting *more* coherent testimony does not converge on truth and why the right move is to seek independent, external evidence rather than to trust the most confident or most coherent witness. The characteristic cost and failure, when the pattern is unrecognized, is false convergence or arbitrary adjudication — treating one coherent account as ground truth because it is vivid, confident, or congenial, when its coherence is evidence only of internal consistency, not of correctness.

Read as a genus rather than as the film reference, the same skeleton recurs across structurally unlike domains. In *law*, eyewitness testimony conflicts in criminal trials are exactly this: several honest witnesses give internally coherent, mutually incompatible accounts of one event, and the court cannot adjudicate on the testimony alone — it must import external evidence (forensics, timestamps). In the *blind-men-and-the-elephant* parable, each observer builds a coherent account (rope, wall, spear) faithful to a partial vantage, and the accounts conflict irreconcilably until an external, whole-elephant vantage is supplied. In *scientific peer review*, two reviewers can reach opposite, internally-argued verdicts on the same manuscript, each coherent from its own standards and reading, with no procedure internal to the two reports to decide which is right — an editor must adjudicate from outside. Crime testimony, the elephant parable, and peer review are three genuinely different substrates; the shared skeleton — plural coherent constructions of one reality, unreconciled without outside evidence — is the candidate lift.

## Notes

**Provenance.** Produced by operator 05 (generalization / lift) as the proposed GENUS of the input `rashomon_effect`, by stripping the Kurosawa film reference and its crime-testimony setting to expose the underlying epistemic structure of plural internally-coherent accounts of one reality, unreconciled without external evidence. Surfaced in the op-05 *remaining-strata* sweep on 2026-07-03. It claimed three cross-domain siblings — eyewitness testimony conflicts in criminal trials, the blind-men-and-the-elephant parable, and peer reviewers reaching opposite verdicts on one manuscript. Manifest tier: B (Tier-B "rest").

**For owner evaluation (keep/cut).** Candid Tier-B assessment: the genus label is a **proposer COINAGE** — "unreconciled plural witness construction" is a descriptive name the sweep minted to abstract away the film reference; it is not an established named structure. Treat it skeptically. The case FOR is somewhat stronger than the other two Tier-B candidates in this batch because the *underlying* pattern (perspectival underdetermination of truth by testimony) is a recognized epistemological phenomenon, and the input `rashomon_effect` is itself a fairly framed prime whose de-framing to an epistemic genus is a legitimate move; the three siblings are genuinely unlike and pass the sibling-test. The specific RISKS, in priority order: (1) **alias of an existing underdetermination / perspectivism / observer-dependence prime** — the sharp keep/cut question. The corpus plausibly already carries an underdetermination, perspectivism, observer-dependence, or unreliable-signal prime; this candidate may be an alias of one of those under a witness-flavored name. This must be checked before accepting. (2) **framed, not structural** — the structural_framed estimate is ~0.52 (*framed*): the pattern carries epistemic content (accounts, coherence, adjudication) and presupposes representation-forming observers, so it sits toward the framed end and the corpus's inclusion bar for framed primes applies. (3) **restatement of the input** — similarity to `rashomon_effect` is ~0.66; decide whether this genus is worth minting alongside the input or whether `rashomon_effect` should be re-headed to the de-framed epistemic structure with the trial/elephant/peer-review cases as examples. **Sharp question for Kurt:** is there already an underdetermination or perspectivism prime this collapses into — and if not, is the de-framed genus distinct enough from `rashomon_effect` to warrant a separate prime, or should the input simply absorb the lift?

**At incorporation.** Re-run similarity against `rashomon_effect` (the input) and — critically — against any existing underdetermination, perspectivism, observer-dependence, unreliable-signal, or multiple-interpretation prime to rule out an alias before accepting; this is the deciding check. If distinct, draw a subsumption edge `rashomon_effect` → `unreconciled_plural_witness_construction` (the film-framed input is a species of the epistemic genus) and sibling/example edges to the trial, elephant, and peer-review cases; if an underdetermination prime exists, add a missing-edge note relating this to it. Because the estimate is *framed*, confirm it clears the framed-prime inclusion bar. Write a v1 draft and sync the one_liner across v1 and v2 per CLAUDE.md before merge.
