Continuity Praxis: The Conservation of Accountability in Epistemic Systems Under Drift

This record presents Continuity Praxis, a law-form theory of epistemic governance grounded in the conservation of accountability under epistemic drift. Systems that claim epistemic authority—institutions, platforms, protocols, or decision-executing agents—often fail not because violations go undetected, but because detected violations are overridden by authority without emitting traceable accountability. Existing governance, compliance, ethics, and safety frameworks regulate behavior, intent, or outcomes, yet permit this failure mode by allowing enforcement signals to be nullified without binding artifacts. Under epistemic drift, such silent overrides make violations observationally indistinguishable from their absence, rendering epistemic validity undefined. Continuity Praxis formalizes this problem structurally. It treats accountability as a conserved quantity, not a moral or normative concept, and derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which epistemic validity can be preserved over time. The theory introduces a minimal set of primitives—receipts (binding accountability artifacts) and scars (irreversible lineage memory)—and proves that any governance system operating under nonzero epistemic drift must conserve accountability through receipt emission, refusal capability, and scar preservation, or else exit the category of epistemically valid systems. The work establishes: an accountability conservation axiom and category-closure result; five Praxis Laws governing override, refusal, emergency action, and memory preservation; a governance continuity equation modeling accountability dynamics under drift; a falsifiable Enforcement Validity Index (EVI) linking enforcement behavior to epistemic legality; a constructive non-equivalence proof showing that compliance, auditing, and ethical oversight cannot substitute for accountability conservation. Continuity Praxis is explicitly not a theory of ethics, compliance, policy, alignment, trust, or outcome optimization. It makes no claims about moral goodness, legality, safety, or desirability. Its sole concern is whether epistemic authority remains structurally definable under drift. Legality and epistemic validity are treated as orthogonal dimensions. The central structural claim is: Any system that claims epistemic authority under epistemic drift must either conserve accountability or accept epistemic invalidation. This record is intended for use in epistemology, philosophy of science, AI governance, institutional design, systems theory, and any domain where authority acts downstream of enforcement under evolving conditions.