
Many distributed, scientific, autonomous, and auditing systems face a structural problem: global facts are generated by causal event histories, while observers usually access only partial projections of those histories. Logs, explanations, measurements, or traces therefore do not by themselves guarantee that a target fact is determinable. This paper names this structural limitation the causal observability gap and develops a formal framework for studying target determinability under partial causal observation. An external target-determination problem is written as P = (ℋ, O, Q), where ℋ is the set of possible real histories, O is the real observation, and Q is the target fact. A faithful reduction maps such a problem to a formal triple (ℱ, Ω, D), where ℱ is a family of finite causal configurations, Ω is an observation function, and D is a formal target. Faithfulness requires preservation of histories, observations, and targets. The adequacy theorem proves that, under these conditions, Q is zero-error determinable from O if and only if D is zero-error determinable from Ω. The core mathematical criterion is quotient factorization: D is determinable from Ω exactly when D is constant on every observational equivalence class, equivalently when there exists g such that D = g ∘ Ω, or equivalently when the observation partition refines the target partition, Π_Ω ≼ Π_D. If two configurations have the same observation but different target values, no decision procedure depending only on the observation can solve the target problem with zero error; the pair itself is a publicly checkable certificate of non-determinability. The paper further develops reconstruction complexity, refinement monotonicity, finite ambiguity bounds, constrained causal evidence as conflict-edge coverage, dynamic configuration streams, approximate determinability, adversarial observation, observation composition, and privacy-observability tradeoffs. The contribution is a falsifiable and reproducible mathematical framework for target-fact determinability under partial causal observation, together with an engineering checker interface.
causal observability gap faithful reduction quotient factorization observation partition constrained evidence coverage target determinability finite model verification audit determinability causal event configurations AI agent auditing
causal observability gap faithful reduction quotient factorization observation partition constrained evidence coverage target determinability finite model verification audit determinability causal event configurations AI agent auditing
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