The epistemic graph
A map of what we claim, what it rests on, and how much to believe it.
Episteme builds and maintains a knowledge graph of claims — propositions that can be true or false — with transparent provenance, decomposition into subclaims, and an honest assessment of validity. It does not tell you what to think. It makes visible the structure of what is being claimed and where the real disagreements lie.
Six honest verdicts
Most of the world's claims cannot — and should not — be flattened to true/false. Episteme assigns one of six statuses, and refuses to round an uncertain claim up to “verified” or down to “false.”
Decomposition is the method
Claims decompose into subclaims. “Inflation was high” becomes “US CPI inflation in 2022 exceeded [threshold],” which depends on a verified fact (the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 6.5%) and a contested definition (what counts as “high”). Following a claim down to its bedrock — uncontested facts, genuinely open empirical questions, or fundamental value premises — reveals exactly where a disagreement actually lives.
A claim may rest on several distinct arguments: independent lines of reasoning, each grouping its own subclaims. “God is real” carries the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments for, and the problem of evil against. Episteme keeps them side by side rather than collapsing them.
How a claim enters the graph
Claims are processed deliberately by dedicated LLM administrators — extracted, matched against what already exists, decomposed, and assessed — not generated ad-hoc in response to a query.
A governance layer — contribution reviewer, claim steward, dispute arbitrator, and an auditor — handles challenges and keeps the graph honest over time. Meet the agents, with their full system prompts →