Operationalizing the evidence_support term in the Confidence-Evidence Ratio (+)

Develop a concrete and deployable operationalization of the evidence_support term in the proposed Confidence-Evidence Ratio (+) for epistemic alignment, specifying reliable procedures to quantify the evidential grounding of large language model outputs so the metric can be empirically applied.

Background

Section 6 introduces the Epistemic Alignment Principle and proposes the Confidence-Evidence Ratio (+) as a regulative metric intended to align a model’s assertoric force with its evidential warrant. The metric requires estimating two quantities: expected confidence (based on linguistic markers of assertoric force) and evidence_support (a proxy for evidential grounding).

While the paper sketches possible proxies and acknowledges technical difficulties (e.g., retrieval overlap, source-grounded factuality scores, and calibration-based measures), it explicitly states that operationalizing the evidence_support component is not yet solved, marking it as an open engineering problem crucial for making the metric actionable in practice.

References

Operationalization of evidence_support in + remains an open engineering problem.

— The Polite Liar: Epistemic Pathology in Language Models  (2511.07477 - DeVilling, 8 Nov 2025) in Limitations and scope (following Section 6.3)

No cases received the planned two-reviewer manual support adjudication, so citation-support and fully grounded reconciliation rates remain undefined, and Level 4 of the evidence ladder is defined but unmeasured.

— FinRCA-Bench: Benchmarking Evidence Retrieval and Reasoning for Financial AI Systems  (2608.18534 - Ghawate, 19 Aug 2026) in Section 9.7, “Grounding is not fully adjudicated”