A Field Guide to Epistemic Failure

Systems fail in ways that existing frameworks cannot see. Not because the knowledge was absent. Because it failed to function. Every organization running complex systems has experienced this: a compliance determination reconstructed from scratch because the prior one didn't survive the transition. An AI system consuming tokens rebuilding context it was given at the start of the session. A team working through a problem they solved eighteen months ago because the solution didn't carry forward. The cost is real. The category for naming it doesn't exist in current accounting frameworks. A Field Guide to Epistemic Failure names eleven distinct ways that knowledge-bearing systems break down — organized into a morphology that reveals their common grammar. Each failure mode is presented with its generating condition, cost signature, observable pattern, and the cascade relationships that connect it to the others. The book is organized into three parts. Part One establishes the foundational vocabulary: what epistemic failure is, how knowledge functions as a constraint-bearing structure, and why existing diagnostic frameworks cannot see what this book describes. Part Two presents the full catalog of eleven failure modes across three operational strata. Part Three asks what becomes visible once you have the vocabulary — and names, honestly, what the taxonomy does not tell you. This book does not tell you what to do. It gives you the vocabulary to see what is already happening.