Explanatory Jurisdiction: Warrant, Authorization, and the Conversion of Testimony

This paper argues that explanation has a neglected second-order normativity. Philosophers usually ask whether an explanation is true, warranted, understanding-producing, useful, or professionally competent. In organized inquiry, however, explanations also do things to other people's contributions. They can defeat a report, route it through a register, export it into later contexts, or close a question for action. I call the authority to perform such role-changing operations explanatory jurisdiction. The central claim is that an explanation can be warranted as an answer while unauthorized as an operation. The paper narrows that claim against its strongest rivals: evidential scope, testimonial injustice, discursive or speech-act injustice, expert authority, and diagnostic overshadowing. Those resources can explain support, credibility, uptake, professional entitlement, and clinical outcome; even together, they do not isolate the normative relation by which an accepted explanation is licensed to convert what a participant says into a different evidential role. The positive account grounds jurisdiction in answerable role-governance: any conversion of a participant's contribution must remain answerable to the question at issue, the evidence available, the role under which the operation is performed, the necessity and proportionality of the operation, the standing of the participant, and the risks of downstream export. Clinical records make the problem especially visible because explanations travel after the encounter that licensed them. The aim is not to weaken clinical expertise, diagnosis, or documentation, but to specify the conditions under which explanations may legitimately do more than answer.