Epistemology remains tacitly anthropocentric: it treats knowledge as something produced and validated through human cognitive capacities such as understanding, intuition, and transparent justification. Yet contemporary science and artificial intelligence increasingly depend on non-human systems that generate mathematically valid results, empirically successful models, and operationally reliable inferences that no human can fully survey or interpret. This article develops xenoepistemics, a structural theory of non-anthropocentric knowledge. The central claim is that epistemic evaluation must be reformulated in terms of system-level properties—reliability, robustness, counterfactual sensitivity, and domain transfer—rather than mentalistic notions such as belief or understanding. I offer (i) a definition of xenoepistemic systems as systems that track structure in a target domain without requiring human-style semantic access; (ii) a minimal account of epistemic agency without minds that avoids trivialization; and (iii) a non-circular trust framework that distinguishes empirical success from epistemic legitimacy using independent validation regimes. This paper addresses a reflexive worry—that a human-authored theory cannot dethrone human epistemology—by separating standpoint from object: xenoepistemics is articulated by humans but is not about human cognition. I discuss the pragmatic value of xenoepistemic knowledge production, the limits of independent verification for opaque systems, domain-relative thresholds for xenoepistemic authority, and the problem of constitutionally human-inaccessible knowledge. Finally, I diagnose and formalize the Marcusian regress paradox: recurrent goalpost-shifting, whereby every machine competence is reclassified as irrelevant once achieved. Xenoepistemics reframes this debate by treating non-human knowledge as a present reality requiring new norms, not as a future curiosity.
Jordi Vallverdú (Wed,) studied this question.