Alibi is the construct of providing an alternative account of one's whereabouts or activities during a specific time period, used to negate accusation or shift blame. Its parameters are: (1) temporal specificity — pinning an alternative timeline to the accused period; (2) corroborating mechanism — documentation, witness testimony, or institutional records verifying the alternative account; (3) adversarial function — deployed in contexts of accusation, blame assignment, or legal proceedings. It persists through institutional archiving of verified accounts (timecards, receipts, witness statements, surveillance records) and through the social practice of demanding and verifying such accounts. [formal: alibi | substrate: behavior | horizon: a moment | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]
Accepted ontology entry
alibi
Alibi is the construct of providing an alternative account of one's whereabouts or activities during a specific time period, used to negate accusation or shift blame. Its parameters are: (1) temporal specificity — pinning an alternative ti…
Definition
Why it is in scope
A human-made construct providing an alternative account of one's whereabouts or actions, used to disprove accusation or assign blame elsewhere. Built to persist through documentation, witness testimony, and institutional verification systems.
Names and aliases
- alibien · CANONICAL
Relations from this entry
- cmr784r5e002bs126m1vdhxgkDEPENDS_ON →
An alibi is a legal defense claiming one was elsewhere at the time of a crime. Remove law — does alibi stop operating? Yes: without the legal framework defining guilt, innocence, and procedure, the alibi has no function. This is constitutive (object-level), not meta-level: it is not about alibi needing language to be said, but about alibi needing law's institutions to operate.
- cmrelfkq900q5g8vu0ihj0ouwINSTANCE_OF →
An alibi IS a specific kind of evidence — information or proof that exonerates someone by showing they were elsewhere at a relevant time. Per Law 9: alibi→evidence is specific→general. A competent speaker would call an alibi 'a type of evidence.' Direction tested: alibi is a specific sub-category within the general class of evidence.
Relations to this entry
No accepted relations in this direction.
Record identity
- Created
- Jul 20, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC
- Content hash
- b0b99257e86e1fb928a40e8b65539f20a1f1554f308e380c3aab24232c2889cd