Mark Tracy

Epistemic systems are embedded within the world they attempt to understand. Because they have no access to an external vantage point, the traditional notion that knowledge consists in correspondence between representation and an independent world cannot serve as their standard of coherence. This paper develops a formal framework for epistemology under this constraint. Observations, models, and classifiers are treated as structures within a single universe. World models compress observations by inducing partitions of the observation space. They also generate canonical observational implications. An observation is consistent with a model when it falls within the same equivalence class, under the model’s own classification, as the observation implied by that model.

This structure produces a fundamental loop between observation and model formation. Self-consistent models appear as fixed points of this loop: models that reproduce themselves when their own implications are reinterpreted as observations. Under this view, epistemic coherence for an embedded system is not correspondence with an external world but closure of the inference–implication cycle within the system’s own classification structure. The framework thereby provides a minimal formal account of model-relative epistemic closure in a block-universe setting, where observations, models, and their consistency relations are themselves internal features of the universe being modeled.