On the Necessary Condition for Artificial General Intelligence: The Problem of the Non-Situated Evaluation Criterion

The literature on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) conflates two structurally distinct concepts: AGI-weak, understood as human-level performance across cognitive tasks within a finite domain, and AGI-strong, defined by recursive self-improvement beyond any pre-given conceptual space. We argue that this conflation reflects the absence of a discipline capable of posing what we call the criterion problem: the question of what properties an evaluation criterion must have for AGI-strong to be coherent. After reviewing three bodies of existing work, AGI definitions, formal recursive self-improvement, and alignment research, we show that each approaches the criterion problem without posing it, treating the criterion as a parameter rather than as a foundational question. Drawing on a transcendental argument whose logical structure is formally analogous to the derivation of non-circular legitimacy conditions in normative theory, we demonstrate that AGI-strong necessarily presupposes a non-situated evaluation criterion, one that cannot be externally specified without reducing the system to narrow AI operating recursively within a bounded domain. We develop a positive characterisation of non-situatedness: a criterion is non-situated if and only if its premises reduce to logical entitlements permitting non-trivial inferences, and falsifiable empirical premises present in scientific debate without established refutation, dynamically revisable with the advance of research. We situate this characterisation relative to Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, Quine, and Peirce, and address its foundations via the Agrippan trilemma, Wittgenstein's hinge propositions, and Wright's epistemic entitlement. An analogy with Fricker's hermeneutical injustice illuminates the structural limits of the situated criterion. We further argue that while spontaneous emergence of a non-situated criterion cannot be excluded, it cannot constitute a scientific research strategy. The paper concludes by specifying the minimal architectural constraint the criterion problem imposes on engineering research and by calling for a new discipline of non-situated epistemic criterion construction.