Overview
A typed ledger for absence: epistemic gaps, ethical restraint, and contemplative negative space. It records what is missing, withheld, or unresolved under a total caution order, decays stale namings past their review horizons, and refuses to infer why anything is absent. Withholding is recorded as a boundary, never mined as missing evidence. Subtitle: Keeping missing evidence, ethical boundaries, and open questions from becoming unsupported claims Code is MIT licensed; prose and figures are CC BY 4.0. See LICENSE in the repository.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- Under the stated contract, no input can make an absence appear more settled than its most cautious observer reported (caution monotonicity).
- In a worked seven-input example with careless and adversarial inputs, intake logged five typed events and the tally was NAMED 0, UNRESOLVED 1, WITHHELD 1, NOT_RECORDED 9.
- A positive-control battery shows every intake code can fire, so zero rows in a tally mean untriggered rather than unreachable; it shows reachability only.
- The defect battery establishes detection of the planted defects only, not the absence of every possible structural fault.
- The author stresses the registry's finiteness: absences outside its eleven categories are not tracked, and extending it requires human judgment.
Methods
- Pure-data Python package: 11-record registry + assess_absence evaluator — The instrument is a small Python package holding a versioned registry of eleven absence records and a staged evaluator, presented as a tested prototype.
- Typology of three absence kinds and four ledger states — Records are typed EPISTEMIC, ETHICAL or CONTEMPLATIVE, and observations assign NAMED, UNRESOLVED, WITHHELD or ledger-reserved NOT_RECORDED.
- Staged intake/matching/scoring with caution order and staleness decay — Intake screens inputs with typed events, conflicting observers resolve to the more cautious state, and dated NAMED entries decay past their review horizon.
- Formal definitions/propositions each bound to a named test — The evaluator is restated as definitions and propositions, and a table maps each to the test that exercises it, checked by tests/test_formalism.py.
- Planted-defect battery for six structural invariants — For each of six registry invariants, a registry carrying exactly that defect is constructed to show the check rejects it while passing the real registry.
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