AIM Framework glossary
Authorship Test
Canonical definition
The third limb of the Three-Test Battery: the identified Individuals must have personally designed and built the system blocking access, rather than having inherited it, participated in it, or benefited from it. The distinction the Authorship Test draws is between architects, who intentionally designed the exclusionary mechanism, and participants or beneficiaries, who operate within a system they did not create. It is the limb the vast majority of Grievance Beliefs fail in complex societies, because the systems producing diffuse harm are older than the people visible within them, and visibility within a system is what the Agent-Based Causal Default supplies in place of authorship over it.
Explanation
The last of the three tests asks whether the people you are blaming built the thing that is blocking you, or merely happen to be standing in it. Almost everyone is standing in it. The arrangements that produce widespread harm are usually older than anyone now visible inside them, and the mind offers up whoever is visible because it cannot represent the arrangement itself.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.