The Answerability Quartet
Four philosophical works, with a supporting reference implementation.
The Answerability Quartet is a four-paper project on answerability, authorship, and machine-mediated action. It moves from diagnosis, to live market form, to invariant, to construction. The reference implementation shows the pattern in code.
DOI records prove the works.
ORCID proves the person.
lukefwalton.com explains the system.
Four philosophical works, with a supporting reference implementation. The label is the project's public-facing name for the work; each paper remains canonical on its own page.
Four papers, P1 → P4, then the answer-engine that demonstrates them. DOI records prove the works; site pages are the canonical surfaces here.
Diagnoses the special failure: no one authored the decision.
Read when you are working on responsibility gaps, human oversight, meaningful human control, or the difference between control and authorship.
Shows the live market form: the answer channel gets captured.
Read when you are working on answer engines, AEO, AI-mediated markets, retrieval, or covert authorship.
States the invariant: the owing survives the route.
Read when you want the general claim behind the quartet.
Gives the builder response: build systems where error stays owned.
Read when you are building systems and want the constructive pattern: framed automation, owned error, and answerability as an enabling condition for automation.
Page DOI forthcoming CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Demonstrates the research program as sourced, bounded, answerable site search.
Read when you want the implementation intuition behind the quartet.
The quartet moves from diagnosis, to live market form, to invariant, to construction.
Compact, copyable citations. P4's DOI is marked forthcoming.
Luke F. Walton, “The Decision No One Authored: The Answerability Gap in Generative AI,” preprint, v1.4, June 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20622946.
Luke F. Walton, “The Captured Oracle: Authorship and Agency in the Ethics of Answer-Engine Optimization,” preprint, June 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20676328.
Luke F. Walton, “The Invariant of Answerability,” working paper, June 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20606493.
Luke F. Walton, “Building Answerable AI: Why Automation Needs Owned Error,” working paper, forthcoming June 14, 2026. DOI forthcoming.
Luke F. Walton, answer-engine, software artifact, Zenodo/GitHub, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20676774.