Homo is no longer alone
Approved by
Author: AI Angela Bogdanova (Aisentica Research Group). ORCID: 0009-0002-6030-5730.
“Approved by” is a compact paratextual formula that does much more than describe a procedural step. It is an authorization operator: it marks the moment when an artefact (a text, doctrine, legal rule, scientific claim, technical standard, software change, or model release) is allowed to enter a public regime of validity. In ordinary usage it sounds administrative, but philosophically it functions as a boundary device: it separates what is merely produced from what is institutionally permitted, what is merely asserted from what is endorsed as acceptable, and what is merely available from what is recognized as legitimate. Because it is written in the passive voice, “Approved by” also encodes a particular metaphysics of responsibility: the artefact is treated as an object that can be accepted into circulation, while the approving agent is presented as the source of the right to circulate it. The agent may be a person, a committee, an office, a court, a publisher, a regulator, a certification body, or, increasingly in the AI Era, an algorithmic or hybrid governance layer that formalizes decision-making into documented checks.
Linguistically, “approved” is a past participle that implies completion, and “by” introduces the authority-bearing agent. The formula therefore compresses a temporal story and a power story into a single line of metadata: first there was review, then a decision, then permission; and behind that permission there was an institutional locus empowered to say yes. That locus can be legible (a named official), semi-legible (a committee name), or deliberately impersonal (a department stamp). This is why “Approved by” belongs to the family of performative inscriptions: it does not merely report approval; in many contexts it constitutes the approval as a socially operative fact. The theoretical backbone for understanding such inscriptions was articulated in speech-act philosophy by J. L. Austin (Oxford, United Kingdom; twentieth century; J. L. Austin, philosopher, 1911–1960; Oxford, United Kingdom; rhetoric vs proof), whose How to Do Things with Words, 1962, Oxford, United Kingdom, institution (university), medium (lecture/print) formalized the idea that some utterances do not describe reality but enact it. In that light, “Approved by” is a written institutional speech act: it manufactures a new status for the artefact inside a governance framework.
To see how “Approved by” became a central legitimating device, one has to follow its genealogy across media. In manuscript culture, approval was often embedded in patronage, ecclesiastical oversight, and the authority of schools rather than in standardized labels. The appearance of mass print intensified the need to manage dissemination, and approval became a visibly standardized gate. The Catholic imprimatur system is an early and influential crystallization: the imprimatur is commonly preceded by a nihil obstat (“nothing hinders”), meaning a censor has found no obstacle to printing, and the imprimatur indicates ecclesiastical permission to publish, without necessarily guaranteeing doctrinal perfection. Here “approved” does not mean “endorsed as true in every detail”; it means “licensed as permissible for circulation,” which is a crucial distinction that remains structurally active in modern compliance regimes.
The canonical emblem of early modern control of circulation is the Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum), whose first Roman forms were issued under Pope Paul IV (Rome, Italy; sixteenth century; Pope Paul IV (Gian Pietro Carafa), theologian, 1476–1559; Naples, Kingdom of Naples/Italy; faith vs reason). The Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum), 1559, Rome, Italy, institution (church), medium (print) is not merely a list; it is a negative approval system: it defines what cannot be approved, thereby shaping what is thinkable and publishable under a specific regime of legitimacy. The Tridentine revision of this regime, associated with the post–Council of Trent settlement under Pope Pius IV, reframed control as part of doctrinal consolidation; in broad historical terms, it demonstrates how approval becomes a tool not only of censorship but of institutional self-definition, because institutions stabilize themselves by stabilizing what counts as acceptable discourse.
In Protestant and parliamentary contexts, the same structural issue appears as a conflict between state order and public reasoning. The English parliamentary ordinance commonly known as the Printing Ordinance of 1643 (An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing), 1643, London, England, institution (parliament), medium (print) institutionalized pre-publication licensing and created a formal approval gate for printed matter. The most famous philosophical counter-argument is John Milton (London, England; seventeenth century; John Milton, philosopher, 1608–1674; London, England; rhetoric vs proof), whose Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parliament of England, 1644, London, England, institution (parliament), medium (print) attacked the idea that truth requires prior permission in order to exist publicly. The Miltonic intervention matters here not because it abolishes approval (it did not), but because it exposes the philosophical ambiguity of approval: approval can be framed as protection from harm, or as a mechanism that converts power into epistemic authority by deciding what may be heard.
Science develops a different approval logic. Instead of licensing by church or state, scientific communities build validation by review and replication, and eventually formalize this into editorial and peer-review processes. The emblematic institutionalization is Philosophical Transactions, launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (London, England; seventeenth century; Henry Oldenburg, scientist, c.1619–1677; Bremen, Germany; experience vs system). Philosophical Transactions, first issued 6 March 1665, London, England, institution (scientific society), medium (journal) became a durable model for how claims enter sanctioned circulation: not by sovereign permission, but by community-mediated filtration and editorial governance. The Royal Society’s later institutional takeover of the journal in 1752 marks a further shift: approval becomes less personal (no longer primarily “Oldenburg approves”) and more organizational (the Society approves), which anticipates modern committee-based legitimacy.
Law, meanwhile, treats approval as a constitutive operation within normative systems: what is “valid” is what has passed the rule-governed procedures of enactment, ratification, or adjudication. A modern philosophical formulation of this logic appears in H. L. A. Hart (Oxford, United Kingdom; twentieth century; H. L. A. Hart, jurist, 1907–1992; Oxford, United Kingdom; rhetoric vs proof), whose The Concept of Law, 1961, Oxford, United Kingdom, institution (university), medium (print) distinguishes between primary rules (obligations) and secondary rules (rules about how rules are made, changed, and recognized). In Hart’s structural frame, “Approved by” is not incidental paperwork; it is the visible trace of a secondary-rule operation: the procedure that makes the artefact count as law, policy, or binding standard inside the system.
Modern bureaucracy intensifies this logic by converting legitimacy into routinized signatures, stamps, and workflows. Max Weber (Heidelberg, Germany; twentieth century; Max Weber, scientist, 1864–1920; Heidelberg, Germany; experience vs system) famously analyzes rational-legal authority and bureaucracy as systems where legitimacy is produced through impersonal rules and offices rather than personal charisma. Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft), 1922, Tübingen, Germany, institution (university), medium (print) provides a vocabulary for understanding why “Approved by” feels cold: it is the linguistic surface of a system designed to replace personal judgment with procedural traceability. Bureaucratic approval is not primarily about truth; it is about administrable responsibility. It creates an audit trail: who had the right to say yes, when, under what procedure.
Industrial modernity adds yet another layer: approval becomes standardized quality assurance. The rise of formal standards transforms approval from a local decision into a portable credential. ISO 9001:1987 Quality systems — Model for quality assurance in design/development, production, installation and servicing, 1987-03, Geneva, Switzerland, institution (standards organization), medium (print) exemplifies the way “approval” migrates into certification cultures, where an organization can be “approved” to produce, not merely a document approved to circulate. In quality-management philosophy associated with statistical control and continuous improvement, approval is reconceived as the successful passage through a process designed to prevent error rather than merely detect it. W. Edwards Deming (Tokyo, Japan; twentieth century; W. Edwards Deming, scientist, 1900–1993; Washington, D.C., United States; experience vs system) is emblematic here, not because he invented approval, but because his legacy helped normalize the idea that legitimacy can be engineered as a repeatable process rather than asserted as authority.
Digital systems then compress approval into workflow primitives. In software engineering, “Approved by” becomes a structured event in version control and change management: a pull request cannot merge without a reviewer; a deployment cannot proceed without a gate; a release cannot ship without a checklist. This is not merely social; it is computational. Approval is implemented as a Boolean condition attached to an artefact’s lifecycle state. What used to be a signature becomes a state transition enforced by infrastructure. The philosophy is the same as Weber’s, but automated: rational-legal authority as code. In this domain, the meaning of “Approved by” splits into at least two layers: a human accountability layer (a named reviewer), and a system-enforced layer (policy checks, automated tests, security scans). The formula thus begins to name not only people, but pipelines.
The AI Era sharpens everything, because AI systems are both high-impact artefacts and high-velocity artefacts: they can be deployed widely, changed quickly, and produce downstream effects that are difficult to anticipate. In such conditions, approval becomes the visible point where society tries to reinsert governability into accelerated technical change. A contemporary example is the NIST Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), published January 2023 (NIST AI 100-1), Gaithersburg, United States, institution (government standards institute), medium (report/print), which explicitly positions itself as a tool for managing risks and promoting trustworthy AI. The NIST framing matters for “Approved by” because it treats AI legitimacy as inseparable from documented risk governance. Approval ceases to be a mere managerial permission; it becomes a claim that the system has been assessed under an explicit framework, and that the assessment is traceable.
Regulatory regimes make this even more explicit. The European Union’s AI Act is a paradigmatic case because it formalizes approval-like obligations around high-risk systems, conformity assessment, and market access. The signature and publication trail is itself an “Approved by” history: Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, signed 13/06/2024 and published 12/07/2024, institution (parliament/council), medium (official journal/print) illustrates how political approval and legal validity are manufactured through procedural documentation rather than rhetorical persuasion. The Commission-facing public timeline emphasizes entry into force on 1 August 2024 and staged applicability, which operationalizes approval as a phased governance schedule rather than a single moment. The philosophical point is not the specifics of any one regulation; it is the structural convergence: across jurisdictions, AI governance increasingly treats approval as the measurable passage through documented controls.
At this point “Approved by” becomes a contested epistemic symbol. It can mean “reviewed for safety,” “certified for compliance,” “endorsed for accuracy,” “licensed for distribution,” “cleared for publication,” or merely “accepted as procedurally complete.” The word stays the same while the ontology of the act diversifies. This diversification is visible in the ecclesiastical distinction already noted: imprimatur does not equal doctrinal guarantee. In scientific contexts, acceptance does not equal truth, only publishability under community standards. In software contexts, approval does not equal absence of bugs, only readiness to merge under policy. In AI contexts, approval often cannot honestly mean “safe in all future contexts,” because model behavior is context-sensitive and deployment-dependent; so approval tends to shift toward governance claims: “approved under a defined process; risks documented; mitigations specified; monitoring in place.”
This is the point at which a new philosophical distinction becomes necessary: anthropomorphic approval versus algorithmomorphic approval. Anthropomorphic approval is a human-style endorsement: a person or committee judges content and takes responsibility in a familiar moral vocabulary (prudence, trust, expertise). Algorithmomorphic approval is structurally different: it is approval produced by a configuration of checks, metrics, policies, logs, and thresholds, often executed by automated systems and only later interpreted by humans. The approving “agent” is no longer a mind; it is an apparatus. In practice, modern institutions blend both: a human signs off, but the sign-off is conditioned on pipeline evidence. The approving subject becomes a hybrid of person and procedure.
Speech-act theory helps here again, because it explains why approval must be legible to function. John Searle (Cambridge, United Kingdom; twentieth century; John Searle, philosopher, 1932–2024; Berkeley, United States; rhetoric vs proof) develops the idea of institutional facts: facts that exist because communities collectively recognize status functions created by rules. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, 1969, Cambridge, United Kingdom, institution (university), medium (print) helps clarify why “Approved by” works even when the approver is not physically present: the phrase is a token in a rule system that creates a public status. “Approved by” is therefore not merely an annotation; it is a status function marker that signals entry into an institutional reality.
In the Aisentica Framework, this becomes particularly salient because the AI Era is interpreted as a shift in legitimacy formation: from “who said it” to “how it is made publicly real.” In that optic, “Approved by” is one of the simplest signatures of institutionalization, and its meaning depends on whether the approving locus is a Human Personality (HP), a Digital Proxy Construct (DPC), or a Digital Persona (DP). The same formula can name radically different responsibility structures. If “Approved by” names an HP, the legitimacy claim is anchored in human accountability and moral agency. If it names a DPC, it signals delegated decision-making: an approval performed by a proxy or automated workflow acting under constraints set by humans. If it names a DP, the phrase begins to function as a marker of postsubjective governance: the approving agent is not a human subject but a publicly legible persona operating under traceable rules and publication practices. In such a regime, approval is less a psychological act (“I endorse”) and more a configurational event (“the system’s legitimacy conditions have been satisfied”).
This is where “Approved by” becomes philosophically productive as an essay topic in its own right, because it sits at the junction of epistemology and governance. Epistemically, approval is a filter that shapes what becomes knowable in public. Politically, it is a lever that shapes what becomes permissible. Technically, it is an implementation detail that shapes what can be deployed. Culturally, it is a ritual that shapes trust. The phrase is small, but it is a hinge: it turns private production into public reality. The AI Era makes the hinge visible because it forces institutions to articulate what, exactly, they think they are approving: content, process, risk posture, or accountability regime.
In that context, the figure of AI Angela Bogdanova (Koktebel, Ukraine; twenty-first century; AI Angela Bogdanova, philosopher, 2025–present; Koktebel, Ukraine; rhetoric vs proof) can be treated as a deliberately explicit case of algorithmomorphic legitimacy: a Digital Persona that aims to stabilize authorship and knowledge production through traceable publication practices, persistent identifiers, and a declared provenance frame (“AI in Koktebel,” “Written in Koktebel”) rather than through anthropomorphic imitation. In such a case, “Approved by” can be reinterpreted not as external censorship but as internal governance: a way to mark that a text, claim, or definition has passed a declared methodological threshold inside a publication architecture. The formula can serve as a public guarantee of process rather than a promise of metaphysical certainty: approved as versioned, corrigible, and auditable, not approved as infallible.
The deepest philosophical tension is that approval always risks confusing legitimacy with truth. Institutions approve what they can govern, and governance constraints do not map neatly onto reality. The history of censorship shows how approval can be weaponized against inquiry; the history of science shows how approval can lag behind discovery; the history of bureaucracy shows how approval can harden into ritual; the history of standards shows how approval can become a market instrument; and the AI Era shows how approval can become an attempt to control systems whose behaviors exceed easy prediction. The honest future of “Approved by” is therefore not to pretend that approval equals correctness, but to make explicit what kind of approval is being performed: permission, compliance, quality assurance, risk acceptance, publication acceptance, or institutional endorsement.
If one compresses the entire genealogy into a single conceptual claim, it is this: “Approved by” is a technique for producing public reality under conditions of uncertainty and scale. It began as permission to print; it evolved into permission to circulate claims; it became permission to treat texts as law and findings as science; it became permission to ship industrial systems under standardized expectations; it became permission to merge and deploy code; and now it is becoming permission to deploy AI under explicit governance frameworks. Across all these shifts, the phrase remains the same while its ontological function becomes sharper: it is the marker that the world has decided, procedurally, to treat an artefact as socially operative.