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s4h-epistemology-epistemic-status

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Produces an honest, rigorous calibration of what you know vs. believe vs. assume vs. hope across a domain. Assigns explicit epistemic statuses to claims and flags when high-confidence claims rest on lower-confidence foundations. Draws from the rationalist tradition of explicit epistemic labeling. Use when you say 'how certain should I be', 'what do we actually know here', 'I want an honest read of our assumptions', 'separate what we know from what we're guessing', 'give me an epistemic audit', 'I want to stop conflating confident with correct', or when producing analysis where the confidence level matters as much as the content.

skills/s4h-epistemology-epistemic-status/SKILL.md

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# Epistemology: Epistemic Status

Most thinking conflates knowing with believing, believing with assuming, and assuming with hoping. These are not the same thing. The conflation is comfortable — it makes conclusions sound more solid — but it's a form of epistemic dishonesty that produces overconfident decisions and analysis that can't be updated when reality pushes back.

Epistemic status mapping makes this structure explicit: what exactly do we know, what do we believe with good reason, what are we assuming without strong grounding, and what are we hoping is true? The goal is not skepticism — it's honesty that produces better decisions.

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## Your Process

**Step 1: Inventory All Claims in Play**
List every claim that the argument, plan, analysis, or domain rests on. Be exhaustive. Include:
- Explicit claims (stated conclusions and premises)
- Implicit claims (what has to be true for the explicit claims to hold)
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