The Empty Occupant: Answerability, Testimony, and the Limits of Machine-Mediated Authority

Abstract

An institution can identify who is legally responsible for an automated decision and still lack an effective way to make a justified challenge change its outcome. What, then, sustains its authority to demand compliance? The Empty Occupant: Answerability, Testimony, and the Limits of Machine-Mediated Authority investigates this problem across philosophy of language, social epistemology, institutional theory, and automated administration. It connects three questions often examined separately: who owns an institutional commitment, what warrants adopting machine-generated content, and whether the resulting obligations can be serviced at the scale of deployment. The monograph develops a framework for distinguishing genuine institutional participation from its conversational appearance. Its concepts of Normative Sponsorship, Deontic Debt, and Institutional Insolvency explain how responsibility can remain identifiable while review, correction, and repair become ineffective—and why those failures matter for continued authority. Bounded analyses of Robodebt, Air Canada’s chatbot, TennCare, Post Office Horizon, and the Dutch childcare-benefits affair connect the philosophical arguments to documentary evidence. Positive conceptual comparators, a worked obligation ledger, and a proposed audit specification extend the inquiry to functioning hybrid institutions and prospective oversight. The volume offers researchers a vocabulary for examining whether institutional reasons can actually govern what automated systems are permitted to do. -- Earlier formulations of the arguments developed have circulated as preprints on Zenodo and PhilArchive. This monograph integrates, revises, and extends those arguments within a unified framework. It is the author’s preferred reference for the consolidated presentation; the earlier papers document the development of the individual arguments: Cott, N. (2026). Deontic Debt and Institutional Insolvency: Answerability and the Limits of Scalable Authority. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23175523 Cott, N. (2026). Normative Sponsorship Under Opacity: When Institutions May Own Machine-Mediated Commitments. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23153361 Cott, N. (2026). Testimony Without a Testifier: Epistemic Value and Commitment Ownership in Institutional AI. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23153358 Cott, N. (2026). Answerability and Institutional Commitment: Why Missing Bearership Is Not Defective Ownership. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23153297 Cott, N. (2026). Empty Occupancy: Answerability and the Ownership of Machine-Mediated Institutional Commitments. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23151642