RKCS v0.1: Reality-Knowledge-Consensus Separation Framework

Introduction This Internet-Draft is a faithful conversion of the author's research baseline "RKCS v0.1: Reality-Knowledge-Consensus Separation Framework", dated 20 October 2026, together with the preregistration draft of its 100-case synthetic pilot (EM-001) . Mathematical notation has been rendered in plain text. RKCS v0.1 is a frozen proposed specification plus a small deterministic reference checker, not a validated scientific discovery. It is published for discussion; it is not a standard.

Claim State The state of a proposition p in domain d at time t is the tuple Ontology O is one of {physical, institutional, subjective, mathematical, mixed}; epistemic status E is one of {unknown, proposed, supported, refuted, conflicting}. V denotes evidence records, C scoped consensus, U uncertainty, P provenance, A authority.

Invariants

(I01) Consensus alone cannot verify a physical proposition.
(I02) Unknown differs from refuted.
(I03) Material contradictory evidence is retained.
(I04) Derived claims require justified dependencies.
(I05) Institutional authority is scoped by jurisdiction and effective period.
(I06) Canonical evidence is append-only; corrections create new revisions.

Transition Semantics A promotion requires a nonempty rule identifier, authorized evaluator, applicable valid evidence, and no unresolved material contradiction. For physical claims, independent empirical evidence is required; for institutional claims, jurisdiction-matched institutional evidence; for mathematical claims, proof. This reference implementation is deliberately conservative and not a complete theory of knowledge.

Preregistered Study Sample 100 claims, 20 each in physics, medicine, finance, law, and subjective experience. Use at least three independent reviewers per claim, with domain-specific adjudication and no ground-truth inference from majority agreement. Compare majority vote, evidence-weighted evaluation, and RKCS under equal information budgets. Primary endpoints: unauthorized promotion rate and claim-type-appropriate accuracy. Secondary: calibration (Brier score where binary ground truth is defined), abstention rate, coverage, contradiction preservation, and review latency. Freeze dataset, rules, baseline implementations, and analysis before testing. Confidence intervals and effect sizes must be reported. A 100-item pilot is not powered to establish small effects.

Falsification Adversarial cases: A01 unanimity without evidence; A02 reproducible minority contradiction; A03 institutional status change; A04 missing/stale/conflicting evidence; A05 unsupported derived promotion. Include positive controls to detect degenerate always-reject behavior. RKCS's empirical benefit is rejected if it fails preregistered endpoints against fair baselines.

EM-001: 100-Case Synthetic Pilot Status: frozen synthetic pilot design, not independent empirical validation; the preregistration is NOT REGISTERED. The pilot uses 100 synthetic placeholders: 20 per domain, 10 scenario types repeated twice per domain. No real-world factual claims are used yet. A real benchmark requires independently sourced, versioned claims and source packets, with adjudicators blinded to model output. Primary endpoint: invalid verification promotion rate on independently adjudicated ineligible cases, comparing RKCS with majority vote and evidence-weighted scoring under identical evidence access. Paired differences are reported with confidence intervals; significance thresholds and multiplicity correction are preregistered before collecting human judgments. Secondary endpoints: valid promotion recall, classification accuracy, abstention rate, uncertainty calibration (Brier score and ECE only when probability predictions exist), contradiction retention, latency and adjudicator disagreement, reported by domain and scenario. Human review: at least three independent domain-qualified reviewers per claim, collecting separate classifications, supporting citations, uncertainty and conflict-of-interest declarations. Disagreements are resolved with a fourth blinded adjudicator or the contested labels are preserved. Leakage of intended outcomes, scenario codes and model predictions is prevented. The superiority claim is rejected if primary improvement is absent versus matched baselines, or if valid-promotion recall or abstention cost breaches preregistered noninferiority bounds. No threshold is selected post hoc. Illustrative synthetic metrics (status ILLUSTRATIVE_SYNTHETIC_ONLY, n = 100): EM-001 synthetic pilot metrics

Model	TP	Invalid promotions (FP)	TN	Accuracy
Majority vote	10	70	20	0.30
Evidence-weighted	10	30	60	0.70
RKCS	10	6	84	0.94

Caveats: labels are rule-derived, not independently adjudicated; RKCS is evaluated against an oracle aligned with its own rules (circularity risk); majority votes are simulated, not actual reviewer judgments; evidence weights and consensus proportions are illustrative; subjective claims require separate reference criteria; no probability calibration was tested. This is not a scientific performance claim: synthetic rule-oracle results are software smoke tests, not evidence that RKCS improves scientific reasoning. Independent adjudication NOT RUN.

Limitations Formal tests verify only the encoded rules, not empirical truth, metaphysical existence, external replication, priority, or patentability. No experiment with human reviewers has been performed. The reference code does not persist event logs, implement time validity, calibrate confidence, or establish evidence authenticity; these are required future work.

Provenance PI: Deonte O'dell Watts; AI-assisted formulation. First documented in this research record on 2026-10-20; historical priority unverified.

IANA Considerations This document has no IANA actions.

Security Considerations This document defines no protocol. A system implementing these transition rules is a target for manipulation: an attacker who can inject fabricated evidence records, impersonate an authorized evaluator, or alter the append-only evidence store can cause unauthorized promotion of claims. Evidence authenticity, evaluator authentication and tamper-evident storage are therefore preconditions that the v0.1 reference code does not provide. Consensus signals are easy to manufacture (for example, coordinated or automated reviewers), which is the motivation for invariant I01; deployments should not weaken it. Retaining contradictory evidence (I03) may expose sensitive material and needs access control.