From Notice to Contestable Grounds
Necessary Informational Conditions for Algorithmic Contestability

Kerry Thornhill
Outline in development
Research source: 2026-09-09
Public summary: 2026-09-19, v1



RESEARCH QUESTION

Where law, policy, contract, professional obligation, institutional commitment, or a separate normative theory requires or promises meaningful contestability, which informational operations must remain available to identify and investigate a material objection?


PROPOSED ARGUMENT

The article proposes three linked conditions: a challenge-generating baseline that helps a person recognize the determination and formulate a plausible material question; preservation of the contemporaneous, decision-specific grounds; and inquiry-activated access to the grounds that question requires.
Six candidate functions organize the relevant tasks. A function, or a faithful equivalent, is conditionally necessary only where no feasible route that omits it can perform the required task with adequate epistemic fidelity. The objection, conditions, candidate substitutes, and adequacy criteria must be specified independently.
This makes the register vulnerable to counterexamples and empirical revision. Necessity belongs most securely to the task; the sixfold partition remains a hypothesis.
The duty bracketPaper A asks what meaningful contestability requires where an opportunity to contest is independently required or promised. Paper B separately asks when a private institution owes that opportunity.


ARTICLE OUTLINE

Notice without contestable grounds. Introduce the problem and the conditional research question.From explanation to contestational capability. Locate the contribution within contestability, transparency, reviewability, and evidence-access research.Object, standpoint, and scope. Define operative determinations and material objections from the affected-person or representative standpoint.Conditional functional necessity. Specify the no-substitute test and distinguish faithful equivalence from practical adequacy.Staged availability. Connect baseline orientation, preservation, activated access, protected mediation, and institutional uptake.Six candidate functions. Examine the tasks, boundaries, and possible substitutes associated with each function.A structured legal demonstration. Use K.W. v. Armstrong to examine the architecture without treating one case as general validation.Objections and boundary conditions. Address partition choice, burden, capability, formalism, and portability.Empirical vulnerability. Specify how rival partitions, omissions, and faithful substitutes could defeat the claims.Conclusion. Restate the conditional contribution and its limits.


THE CANDIDATE REGISTER

See the six candidate functions on the Research page.


WHAT THE ARGUMENT DOES NOT ESTABLISH

The register does not establish that all six functions are activated in every contestation, that every person must possess every record, or that unrestricted immediate disclosure is always necessary. It does not independently establish a private institution’s duty or guarantee a just outcome.
The contribution concerns an objection-to-operation architecture and its tests. It does not claim to have originated contestability, layered transparency, preservation, reviewability, or evidentiary access.
Continue to Paper B: institutional answerability →

https://contestability.ai/paper-a/