Factual Governance and Jurisprudence in Public Knowledge

Abstract

Public knowledge is constituted through relations that extend beyond the categories ordinarily recognized by legal rights and legal adjudication. Questions concerning provenance, historical priority, attribution, recognition, authorship, modification, responsibility, and social status may have significant consequences for the production and circulation of knowledge while remaining only partially operable through conventional legal mechanisms. This work develops a framework for factual governance in public knowledge by distinguishing the heterogeneous kinds of facts that arise within public epistemic fields and examining their different conditions of formation, persistence, revision, contestation, and institutional constitution. The analysis develops a fine-grained taxonomy of material, event, historical, provenance, recognition, social, institutional, and legal facts, together with a comparative account of their properties and relations. Particular attention is given to the distinction between historical occurrence and evidentiary reconstruction, the persistence of provenance under waiver or denial, the formation of social facts through recognition and repetition, and the interaction between public factualization and jurisdiction-specific legal facts. These distinctions support a governance-matching principle according to which modes of governance should correspond to the type, characteristics, generative field, and institutional constitution of the factual relations concerned. For disputes whose relevant relations remain outside effective legal operability, the work develops an account of public factual governance based on evidence, contestability, provenance preservation, correction, and informational enforcement within the public knowledge field itself. For disputes involving legal facts, public factual governance and legal governance are treated as distinct but interacting domains with different competencies, temporalities, remedies, and forms of authority. The work further examines provenance usurpation, historical priority, founderhood, relational dissociation, recursive openness, manifest revision, and the design of public-knowledge licenses. At the institutional level, the work envisages a voluntary transnational public-knowledge governance organization through which participating institutions may adopt common evidentiary and procedural standards, submit factual disputes to independent review, recognize public epistemic findings, and undertake appropriate corrective actions within the records and infrastructures they maintain. Such an arrangement provides a model of associational governance whose authority arises from voluntary participation, procedural legitimacy, shared standards, and distributed implementation. The final parts consider machine-readable provenance, AI-mediated recursive knowledge production, and a generative relational jurisprudence capable of connecting openness, historical integrity, public contestability, and institutional revisability within transnational public knowledge.