Co-Experience and the Legibility of Contribution: A Preliminary Discussion of Evaluation by Non-Participants

Abstract

Contributions that sustain households, workplaces, communities and research fields are routinely absent from the records by which those same formations are assessed. The standard explanations locate the absence in power, in exclusion, or in the cost of observation. This paper proposes a different mechanism and argues that it operates prior to all three. Value of the generative kind, which consists in what a relation makes possible for its participants, is carried by evidence available only from inside the relation; value of the allocative kind, which consists in stocks already held, is carried by evidence available at a distance. An evaluator positioned outside a relation therefore faces an evidence set that is not merely smaller but systematically biased in kind, and the bias survives complete good faith, unlimited recording capacity and equal access. The paper states this as a legibility asymmetry, gives it a minimal order-theoretic carrier, and verifies the resulting monotonicity by simulation. Three consequences follow. The familiar appeal to coarse-graining explains less than it appears to, since universality arguments support the evaluator and not the objection to him. The appeal to scarcity is misplaced, since a resource constraint fixes a budget and never fixes what the budget is spent on. And the case for retaining fine-grained material rests on option value under irreversibility, which requires no prediction and no moral premise. The account is offered as a diagnosis with a determinate mechanism, and it declines to supply either a criterion of justice or a design for the infrastructure its diagnosis would recommend.