Evidence Eligibility. The state that says material is allowed to ground a specific conclusion, for a specific actor, in a specific context.
Material can be real, relevant, retrieved, and still ineligible. It may be stale, unapproved, unlicensed, too sensitive for the actor, missing provenance, outside the permitted use, or unhealthy enough that grounding on it would launder risk into the answer. Eligibility is therefore not the same as existence or retrieval; it is the governed result of admission, source health, sensitivity, freshness, and policy.
Approval is explicit evidence approval state: pending, rejected, revoked, or missing approval makes material ineligible even if it was successfully fetched.
The freshness part is explicit freshness state: stale, unknown, or context-expired evidence can be ineligible even when it is otherwise approved.
Evidence eligibility gives governed evidence its operational edge. A system that cannot say whether a source is eligible cannot honestly perform retrieval-grounded reasoning, because it cannot distinguish grounding from evidence laundering.