Knowing that human judgment can be fallible, we propose to distinguish the subjective ascription of a property, such as autonomy, from the genuine fact that an entity is characterised by a certain property, i.e., it is autonomous. In this paper, we take a closer look at this distinction and what it is grounded on, taking a constructivist stance that sees the scientist as an observing subject. We arrive at a notion of fortified ascription, in which knowledge and scientific study of generative mechanisms play an important role, and look at some models of autonomy in the light of this distinction.