Self-Legibility: The Capacity to Interpret One's Own Operating State Not Dependent on Any Single Institutional Context

This paper defines and formalizes Self-Legibility: a person's structurally mediated epistemic capacity to accurately perceive, interpret and render actionable their own functional state, operational requirements, expertise and professional identity, both to themselves and to others, not dependent on any single institutional, organizational or relational context. This epistemic capacity is distinct from a dispositional trait in that its realized level rises and falls with the perceptual apparatus through which it is exercised, which may be supplied by an institution or built and owned by the person. It is detectable through a discrepancy signature: a directionally structured pair of gaps, inward (operating state versus one's own interpretation of it) and outward (capability versus the capability the environment detects). The discrepancy signature is predicted to appear on separation and to shift with infrastructure reconstitution instead of elapsed time. The disruption is structural, located in the relationship between a person and the institutional infrastructure provisioning their functioning. The central claim is that separation removes both the infrastructure organizing capability and the perceptual apparatus through which the person assesses their own state, producing a self-concealing constraint in which structural shortfall is misread as personal limitation.