The Transmission of Co-Experience Knowledge: Interpretive Power, Epistemic Standing, and Responsibility

Abstract

Knowledge generated through shared practice, testimony, consultation, oral history, collaborative research, and institutional inquiry acquires portability through selective transformations. A relation gives rise to an account; an account becomes a trace; a trace enters interpretation, circulation, use, preservation, and possible regeneration. These transitions can preserve a declared content feature while changing participant linkage, interpretive authority, contestability, burdens, benefits, and future generative conditions. This position paper develops a co-experience-specific account of that problem. Its central philosophical claim is that transmission carries at least four independent continuity dimensions: target-relative object continuity, participant and provenance linkage, interpretive-authority continuity, and generative-condition continuity. The paper proposes transmission justice as a local diagnostic for governing these dimensions across stages. A substantial literature discussion places the proposal beside epistemologies of testimony, epistemic injustice, silencing, situated knowledge, decolonizing methodology, boundary objects, classification infrastructure, historical and archival power, oral-history ethics, Indigenous data sovereignty, structural responsibility, and moral repair. The formal component types the trajectory, makes fidelity target-indexed, represents plural standing and stage-specific agency, separates eight normative and responsibility statuses, and proves a limited trace-only non-recovery result. Four constructed cases examine whether stage localization changes evidence demands or remedies. The framework remains provisional and earns retention through comparative and practical discrimination.