Delegated authority
How judgement and operational discretion migrate into procedures, institutions, metrics, and artificial systems.
Peter Kahl
Philosopher of AI governance, knowledge, and institutional responsibility.
Investigating how human and artificial systems decide what counts, whom to recognise, and where responsibility remains.
Research orientation
A philosophy of epistemic authority for artificial systems.
Peter Kahl develops philosophical and governance frameworks for understanding how authority, evaluation, recognition, and responsibility are structured in technical and institutional environments.
His work spans AI governance, epistemic justice, fiduciary responsibility, research governance, social mobility, and the philosophy of knowledge. A recurring concern is answerable judgement: the capacity to reconstruct who authorised a decision, by what standard it was made, and where responsibility remains located.
Research programme
Knowledge, authority, recognition, responsibility.
Evaluative control
Who controls the standards by which claims, persons, risks, and outputs are assessed.
Recognition systems
How institutions recognise, misrecognise, suppress, or domesticate competence, originality, and generative thought.
Answerability
How responsibility can remain reconstructable when governance becomes procedural, automated, or infrastructural.
Selected work
Current papers and frameworks.
- The Recognition Game Metrics, social mobility, and the deformation of knowledge.
- The Answerability Fuse A statutory trigger for reconstructable decisions.
- Delegated Discretion Mandate design, bounded authority, and allocatable responsibility.
- Objective-Layer AI Endogenous evaluation and the governance of artificial systems.
- The Duck and the Philosopher Epistemic maintenance, generativity, and distributed knowledge systems.
Central concern
The problem is not only what systems decide. It is where judgement has gone.
Across institutional and artificial systems, the central question is whether authority remains intelligible. When judgement is displaced into metrics, procedures, models, benchmarks, or delegated technical systems, responsibility may remain formally assigned while becoming practically unreconstructable.
Kahl’s work examines that gap: the point at which evaluation continues, but answerability no longer does.
Contact
Academic, policy, and institutional enquiries.
Available for academic collaboration, invited lectures, visiting appointments, research conversations, and selected advisory work concerning AI governance, epistemic systems, and institutional responsibility.