EAC: minimum doctrinal decisions
Objective: publicly lock the minimum decisions that make External Authority Control (EAC) readable, enforceable, and unambiguous, without publishing operational protocol.
This page does not describe how to qualify an external authority. It establishes what is now considered canonical regarding the layer, its scope, and its boundaries. For the definition and doctrine: canonical definition · EAC doctrine.
1. The 8 minimum decisions
- EAC designates the layer, never the default metric.
By default, “EAC” refers to the governance layer. Any metric use must be named explicitly. - EAC-gap designates the measured differential.
EAC-gap is a diagnostic reading (differential), distinct from the layer. It serves to observe a gap, not to govern by itself. - EAC qualifies admissible authority, not absolute truth.
EAC bounds what may constrain interpretation. Truth remains tied to evidence, context, and legitimacy rules (notably Q-Layer). - Admissibility is claim-scoped, time-scoped, and scope-bound.
An admissibility statement applies at the level of a claim (or homogeneous family), within a time (version / state), and within a scope (jurisdiction, mode, context, risk profile). - Relocalization does not transform the exogenous into the endogenous.
Copying, citing, mirroring, archiving, or hashing an external source does not, in itself, change its ontological status. Popularity and recurrence do not canonize authority. - EAC indeterminacy must propagate a constraint toward the Q-Layer.
When external admissibility status is undetermined and materially affects a response, doctrine imposes a hardening of output conditions (prudence, qualification, or legitimate non-response). - A2 does not automatically derive from EAC.
An authority may be admissible without requiring amplification. EAC governs admissibility; A2 governs exposure and amplification. - Layer 3 begins only where authority becomes executable.
As long as the regime remains reconstruction and restitution, EAC bounds interpretation. As soon as an output triggers an action (agentic / transaction), the relevant regime is no longer EAC alone but an authority governance regime for execution (Layer 3).
2. Scope and non-disclosure
- Public: definitions, boundaries, doctrinal states, articulation between layers, scope limits.
- Private: internal criteria, weightings, detailed transitions, decision logs and registries, calibrations, tooling.
This separation is deliberate. It protects doctrine against “recipe” drift and maintains a clear boundary between public canon and protocol under mandate.
3. Canonical articulation (reminder)
The reference doctrinal sequence is: external graph → EAC → governed negation / arbitration → Q-Layer.
EAC complements exogenous governance: it reduces authority entropy by declaring what can actually carry weight, and under what conditions, before amplification (A2) and output legitimacy (Q-Layer) apply.
