Answerable Judgment: A Formal Architecture for Decisions That Remain Open to Reality

Artificial intelligence can now produce answers, recommendations, rankings, plans, classifications, and agent trajectories that appear ready to become decisions. Yet an answer may be correct without being sufficiently grounded, well explained without being legitimately authorized, carefully reviewed without remaining contestable, or initially successful without staying open to what its consequences later reveal. Existing traditions address important parts of this problem. Epistemology studies justification; practical-wisdom research studies context-sensitive judgment; accountability assigns duties to actors and forums; explainability makes outputs intelligible; algorithmic auditing evaluates systems and processes; risk-management standards structure organizational controls; safety engineering studies hazards, feedback, and recovery; and corrigibility asks whether an artificial agent can be modified or stopped. What remains under-specified is the continuous judgment trajectory through which knowledge acquires influence, crosses authority-bearing transitions, enters reality, receives consequence, and can still be reopened. This paper introduces Answerable Judgment as a bounded formal and architectural object for that trajectory. An answerable judgment is not defined as a wise, correct, moral, or successful judgment. It is defined as a judgment whose grounds can be reconstructed, whose advancement into influence is explicitly bounded, whose consequences can return as status-changing evidence, and whose authority remains open to revision. The proposal shifts the carrier of answerability from the final actor alone to the complete judgment trajectory without removing human or institutional accountability. It introduces an Answerability Profile A(J) = ⟨G, L, E, R⟩, a non-compensatory constitution AJ(J) = G ∩ L ∩ E ∩ R, an Answerability Preservation Operator for authority-bearing transitions, an Answerability Continuity Test, a Judgment Reopening Operator, typed answerability states, and a failure topology centered on the Answerability Mirage. It also proposes a Matched-Answer Divergence Benchmark in which identical initial outputs travel through different architectures, allowing answerability to be evaluated through correction latency, authority persistence, contestability, recurrence, and recovery rather than through correctness alone. The paper develops the proposal from the historical passage between the DIKW hierarchy and the Wisdom Equation, while preserving strict non-claims. It does not reduce wisdom to a scalar, claim that formal answerability is sufficient for practical wisdom, attribute phenomenal consciousness to machines, or report empirical validation. Its central hypothesis is narrower: decisions remain more corrigible when the routes connecting grounds, authority, consequence, and return survive every constitutive transition. The theory is defeated if these routes add no explanatory or operational value beyond established accountability, explainability, auditing, safety, or decision-theoretic frameworks. The intended contribution is therefore not a new label for responsible decision-making, but a falsifiable architecture for studying whether a judgment can still answer when reality answers back.