🟢 Transparency
Transparency is disclosure — documentation, logs, reasoning, or output made available in a form a competent reader could in principle understand. It is one input Legibility requires, not a synonym for it.
What It Is
Transparency is the act of making something available: what a system did, what it changed, what it knew, what it excluded. It answers whether information exists in accessible form.
It does not by itself answer two further questions Legibility depends on: whether that information has been rendered as a stable, traceable object specific enough to act on, and whether a party with the standing and means to act has actually been positioned to receive it.
Disclosure plus a stable object plus a positioned party who can act — an accurate filing that sits in a drawer is transparency in the most literal sense and legibility in no sense at all.
What It Is Not
Transparency is not sufficient on its own. A system can disclose exhaustively — logs, reports, published detail — while remaining entirely illegible, if nothing traceable has been produced for anyone to act on. Volume of disclosure is not a substitute for either of Legibility's other two conditions.
Transparency, in this sense, is also not the same thing as this lexicon's own Inspectable Accumulation, which uses "transparency" in a related but distinct register: a reasoning system's own capacity to keep its growing semantic surface inspectable as complexity accumulates, rather than a risk being disclosed to an external party. The two senses share a word, not a referent — see The Word That Was Already Taken for the general discipline this distinction follows.
Relation to Legibility
Legibility is disclosure plus a stable, traceable object plus a positioned party able to act. Transparency supplies only the first of the three. Demoting transparency from anchor concept to input concept is deliberate: treating it as the whole achievement is precisely what allows disclosure regimes to expand without producing anything actionable.
Why It Matters
Disclosure is necessary and comparatively easy to scale — more logging, more reporting, more published detail. The harder conditions, a stable object and a positioned party, do not follow automatically from more transparency, and treating them as though they do is the mistake Legibility exists to name.
Transparency is what makes a risk visible.
Legibility is what makes it actionable.