AIM Framework glossary
Epistemic Hygiene
Canonical definition
Epistemic Hygiene is the class of practices that maintain the conditions under which the Referent condition of a Belief can be determined and the Belief's certainty held accordingly. The end has two limbs, given by the Referent-governance axis of the Hardness–Referent Matrix. A claim a live Referent governs may be converged on. A claim whose Referent has been identified and defied, whose Referent has not been identified, or for which no Referent is constitutively available warrants Epistemic Suspension, and those three are most of what a population receives. The determination separating them is made by tracing provenance rather than by weighing content, a decohered Referent and its verdict being themselves matters of traced record. Practices in the class are discharged by whoever handles a claim in transit. Two of them fall on a structure deciding what a population sees: claims are passed on with their origins intact, to the greatest degree the conditions of handling permit, so the determination can be made and remade by anyone downstream; and corrections are delivered to those who received a claim whose Referent condition has changed, within the interval in which they can still act on it. The standard is what the handler can achieve where the handler stands, a claim arriving already stripped being passed on as one of unknown provenance rather than repaired; and practicability is a fact about conditions rather than about willingness, so a structure that arranges conditions in which provenance cannot be preserved has manufactured the impracticability it pleads. The Presumption Against Scapegoating is an instance discharged by an Individual rather than by a structure. A practice in the class acts before the harm rather than after it, and its failure falls on those who act on the claim rather than on the party who transmitted it. Epistemic Hygiene is the class of practices standing against Referent Blindness. Derived at Chapter 20, Section 20.4.5. Distinction from the Provenance Rule and Epistemic Suspension. The Provenance Rule and Epistemic Suspension both govern the recipient: the Rule holds a received Belief below certainty until its provenance is traced, and Epistemic Suspension is the capacity to rest there. Epistemic Hygiene governs the handler, and it is what makes both dischargeable. A claim stripped of its origins in transit can be traced by no recipient however disciplined, and a recipient who cannot tell which claims warrant suspension must suspend on all of them or on none.
Explanation
Hygiene is not one practice. It is everything people do to keep contamination out of what the body takes in, and the list has grown as more has been learned: washing hands, clean water, cooking food properly, sterile instruments, none of which was on the list to begin with. What makes a practice hygienic is what it is for, not whether it appears on a list. Epistemic Hygiene is the same kind of class in the domain of information. A claim arrives carrying no label saying what kind of claim it is. Some are about things the world can settle and has settled. Some are about things the world has settled and which are being repeated against the answer. Some are about things nobody has ever checked. Some are about taste, where there is nothing to check. Only the first warrants confidence, and the other three, which are most of what reaches anyone, warrant doubt. Any practice that helps people tell which is which, and that keeps the trail intact so they can, belongs to the class. If you do not wash your hands, someone else gets sick. If you strip a claim of where it came from before passing it on, the person who acts on it pays for that, and not you. Nobody is asking you to know what you cannot find out. Passing something on with “I do not know where this came from” attached is doing the job, not dodging it. What is not doing the job is arranging things so the question can never be asked.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.