Auditing Semantic Footprints in Artefactual Systems: A protocol for domain-bounded semiotic surrogacy

Can an artefactual system preserve the operative semantics of a person without claiming to be that person? This paper presents an audit protocol for semantic footprints: domain-bounded, intervention-grounded traces of stable sign–object–interpretant commitments in an artefactual system. The protocol operationalises semantic surrogacy as a falsifiable competence claim, rather than a metaphysical identity thesis, and provides a discipline for avoiding common partition artefacts (context leakage, cue-based overfitting, and stylometric ‘ghost’ persistence). Building on a companion framework that defines a Semiotic Adequacy Test (SAT) for minimal agency in bio–artefactual continuity, we treat SAT’s criteria C1–C4 as inherited infrastructure and contribute four audit-facing components: (i) a formal negative criterion (Π*) for non-generating partitions, (ii) an admissibility firewall for estimators of semiotic density ρ and context plasticity κ, (iii) a minimal intervention suite do(I) suitable for replication, and (iv) a catalogue of failure modes with diagnostics suitable for pre-registration and third‑party review. The result is a practical, intervention-auditable methodology for evaluating semantic surrogacy claims in artefactual systems without collapsing them into avatars/proxies, stylometry, or human-likeness scores.