Transitionhood's End: From Origin-Based to Contribution-Based Evaluation of Scientific Knowledge

Current scholarly rules treat AI use as a discrete act performed by an identifiable researcher at a particular stage, asking whether AI was used, which text it generated, where disclosure is required, and whether a human verified the output. This article argues that the entire configuration belongs to a transitional regime. As AI capability rises and search, summarization, dialogue, and agentic functions become embedded in the information environment, cognitive influence propagates from AI users to non-users: a researcher who never opens an AI system may still be shaped by prior AI dialogue, AI-mediated colleagues, AI-assisted review, generative search, and an academic language already altered by human-LLM coevolution. We call the termination of this regime Transitionhood’s End: it ends not when every researcher operates AI, but when even the cognition of non-users can no longer be separated from an AI-mediated society. At that point, disclosure can document direct tool use but cannot establish cognitive independence from AI. Rational surrender then moves from novice answer production to expert reasoning, verification, and the design of verification itself; and if AGI or ASI generates theories beyond human comprehension, scientific warranty must shift from complete understanding toward operational assurance through replication, prediction, adversarial testing, monitoring, and reversibility. Introducing Echo Scan and interaction-emergent novelty as a third category beyond human-origin and AI-origin novelty, the paper argues that provenance may remain relevant for audit and responsibility, but epistemic acceptance should be governed by novelty, validity, robustness, risk, and human value rather than origin purity.