Testimony Without a Global Translator: Co-Reference, Faithful Transmission, and Shared Evidence Between Embedded Observers

This is the fourteenth paper of a series that redescribes physical reality as a causally consistent history of information updates, and the middle panel of its third triptych: reference, testimony, and objectivity. It asks under what conditions embedded observers with distinct standing representation architectures refer to the same target, transmit content faithfully, take one another's reports up as evidence, and count agreeing reports as genuinely independent corroboration. It argues that shared sign-forms, successful communication, and informal community convergence do not by themselves establish formal co-reference, faithful transmission, warrant, or corroboration. The paper develops a typed architecture of testimony. It separates referent alignment from content translation, and separates a standing translation architecture from the individual translated tokens it produces. It also distinguishes two lineages: target provenance, running from a world target to a source record, and testimonial source provenance, running from a source record through a report to a recipient inscription. Testimony is treated as a cross-observer relation requiring a report-producing role, source provenance, and preserved source attribution at a declared grain. Recipient uptake is a further step that turns received testimony into evidence. The paper distinguishes co-reference, agreement, disagreement, faithful transmission, translation conformity, translation-map adequacy, testimonial chain adequacy, recipient credence, testimonial warrant, objective corroboration, corroborative credence, and corroborative warrant. Agreement entails co-reference, but co-reference does not entail agreement. Faithful transmission entails testimonial source provenance, but it entails neither target provenance nor correctness. Objective corroboration requires concordant support, adequate aggregate report-family reliability, adequate comparison structure, target-provenance diversity, failure diversity, and absence of circular inflation. There is no global translator supplying a unique mapping from outside the history. Every admissible translation and comparison frame is constructed within the history and remains relative to declared tasks, grains, and translation paths. The resulting testimonial warrant is peer-to-peer, provenance-sensitive, translation-relative, defeasible, and non-self-certifying.