Phase-Indexed Epistemology

Integral theory’s state/stage distinction describes how different developmental stages interpret non- ordinary states of consciousness, but it provides no explicit protocol for handling the truth-status of propositions generated within those states. Three failure modes result from this gap — Globalization, Instrumentalization, and Flattening — and phase-indexed epistemology is proposed as a minimal formalism for tracking truth-claims across state transitions. The framework includes a proposition schema that tags claims with generating conditions, five transition diagnostics for evaluating cross-phase translation, and a developmental line mapping the capacity for phase-indexing from pre-awareness to full navigational use. The integration infrastructure traditionally embedded in long-term contemplative containers must now be made explicit and portable for a world in which non-ordinary states can be trivially induced. The integrative depth metric that orients the framework is used here operationally — a partial order measured by compression loss across phase transitions — with its non-perspectival grounding, a formal derivation from geometric and semantic necessity, developed in the companion paper Derivation.