Warrant as State: A Regulative Architecture for Scientific Evaluation

Scientic evaluation rests on conventions that are rarely part of the object evaluated: sig-
nicance thresholds xed by tradition, verdicts coerced into pass or fail, normalization
and missing-data policies left implicit, and error-correction treated as an afterthought.
We take this diagnosis as established by two decades of metascience and ask a nar-
rower questionwhat form should an adequate response take? We argue the response
should be architectural rather than statistical: because the degrees of freedom an ana-
lyst enjoys are a structural feature of inquiry and not a remediable defect of method,
the leverage lies in making them auditable, not in engineering them away. We propose a
regulative framework of four commitmentsa contract xed before the evidence, a third
indeterminate verdict alongside conformance and nonconformance, disciplined revision,
and an append-only recordand show that they compose not as a list but as a layered
architecture in which each component's content stands alone while its epistemic force
is grounded in the others. We then defend the framework against the two objections it
most invites: that its organizing principle is covertly vericationist and self-undermining,
and that its apparent delivery of analyst-independent verdicts is defeated by the theory-
ladenness of the conventions it freezes. Both are answered by drawing a distinction
the surface claim elidesan uncorroborated conjecture from a meaningless utterance,
auditor-independence from author-independenceand in each case the defensible claim
is the smaller one: the framework eliminates no researcher freedom, but renders it au-
ditable. None of the four commitments is individually novel. The contribution is their
integration under an explicit fallibilist reading, the demonstration that they cohere as an
architecture, and a falsication program to which, by its own standard, the framework
submits itself as a proposal not yet corroborated.