Beyond Bias and Variance: Toward an Asymptotic Epistemology of Embodied Inference
Erkenntnis May 9, 2026 Mahammad Ayvazov
Finite cognitive agents achieve reliable knowledge not by minimizing error through optimal model selection, but by attaining “asymptotic coherence”—a form of epistemic stability that emerges through structured simplification. Perfect epistemic coherence is a formal attractor that embodied knowers approach but cannot reach due to physical and computational limits. This challenges both foundationalist and coherentist theories. Instead, human knowledge is characterized by bounded rationality: inference strategies that maintain structural coherence across informational insufficiency. This is not a deficient approximation of ideal rationality but an irreducibly distinct epistemic form, constituted by the structure of cognitive environments. The framework draws on embodied and enactive approaches to cognition.