Phase A of the curriculum-license-loop arc. Design only; no production code,
no flag, no default changed.
Rules R1-R9: polarity is a row-level field (absent => affirmative), negatives
compile to the sentential-not form and MUST reuse the affirmative connective
(atom identity), contradiction is rejected at ratification, premise
compilation becomes query-scoped, an empty scope is UNKNOWN, premise_count
keeps reporting family size, the oracle learns polarity independently, and a
band's honest ceiling must be reported before anyone authors for it.
Three findings, each measured in-tree and each reversing something:
1. `polarity` is read by nothing. A row authored to refute a question today
serves a confident wrong "Yes" -- and the independent oracle ignores the
field for the same reason, so gold agrees and wrong=0 stays green. This is
the silent-failure class Phase A existed to prevent, now demonstrated.
2. The 16-premise honesty cap holds a family to <=16 chains; at 17 the band
declines everything, including the taught positive that works today. So
ADR-0262 §5.1's own remedy (author ~219 relations) destroys the capability
at row 17, tripping the fix §6 deferred as a future contingency. Jointly:
a band has <=16 entailed cases against a 657-committed threshold, so no
curriculum band can earn SERVE until scoping lands. The blocker is
engineering, not content -- inverting the conclusion two arcs closed on.
3. Honest volume is bounded by taught vocabulary, not corpus size. 8 of 11
bands cannot reach 657 at all, including the plan's chosen first target
physics·modal (ceiling 480, counting every possible question). Retargets
Phase F to philosophy_theology·modal (ceiling 44,104, same 8-chain start).
R5 is the only rule that could change an existing answer, so it is the only
one carrying evidence: 8,520 routable questions, 0 verdict mismatches for both
candidate scopes. Verdict-identity holds for any scope that is a superset of
the query-atom rows, since each premise mints one independent atom. That is
stronger than ADR-0262 §6's soundness argument, and it is why this narrowing
is not the ADR-0261 §5.1 premise-dropping failure.
ADR-0262 §5.1/§5.2/§6 carry forward-pointers; original text preserved.
[Verification]: uv sync --locked on canonical CPython 3.12.13; in-worktree
`core test --suite smoke -q` 556 passed (555 baseline + 1: the derived
ratify-on-merge pin picked up ADR-0264 and discharged it), `--suite
deductive -q` 285 passed. Four probes reproducible from
docs/research/curriculum-premise-scope-2026-07-25.md; the corpus-mutating one
restores the file and asserts byte-identity.
Squashes the arc's work into one commit; the workflow-file edit it originally
carried is excluded (see the end of this message).
## Lane 1 — Workbench recorded a proved answer as ungrounded
With deduction_serving_enabled ratified ON (ADR-0256), workbench/api.py's live
chat route builds a bare ChatRuntime(), so the deduction composer decides
Workbench turns and stamps grounding_source="deduction" — but
_coerce_grounding_source carried a hand-copied whitelist of the six pre-arc
labels and silently rewrote anything else to "none". The runtime comment
reasoned this was inert because "REPL turns do not flow through Workbench's
CognitivePipelineRecord path". True, and irrelevant: the traffic flows the
other way. Stale since 2026-07-24.
Scope is one field. workbench/api.py:818 prefers TurnEvent.epistemic_state,
which read epistemic_state_needed — honest. So the UNregistered path degraded
honestly while the hand-copied whitelist asserted a falsehood; a second copy of
a closed enum was worse than no copy. Hence registration AND derivation:
GROUNDING_SOURCES exposes the Literal's members, and the coercion reads it.
workbench-ui badges/tokens/snapshot follow; enumCoverage.test.ts forces atomicity.
## Lane 2 — the ratification ceremony
The discovery loop was instrumented but not closed. teaching/ratification.py
turns a reviewed decision into a chain record, a corpus commit, and a receipt.
Its design turns on one observation: _ratified_rows DROPS unadmissible rows
silently — correct when serving, a trap when ratifying, because the file grows,
the commit lands, and the band count does not move. So the ceremony refuses to
call an append a ratification until it has re-read the curriculum through the
real loader and seen the chain arrive; a non-admitted append is rolled back.
Validation is a pre-flight courtesy, admission is the proof.
Arena queue entry and ledger reseal are deliberately NOT performed (bridge rule
1); the receipt names them. Front door: `core proposal-queue ratify`, a sibling
of `review` rather than a flag on it.
## Lane 3 — structural closures
- ADR-0263 gains rule 5: absence policy is DECLARED in CAPABILITY_LEDGERS, not
passed at the call site. An AST-matched test fails if a serving path passes
missing_ok again.
- Deductive suite added WHOLE to the pre-push gate: 285 tests in 29s against
smoke's 216 in 62s, so no coverage trade was needed.
- Smoke/CI parity assertion made bidirectional. It was one-directional, and had
drifted.
- test_prior_surface_deduction_binding.py pins correction binding on the
deduction path. The review's diagnosis did NOT reproduce — hash_surface moves
in lockstep — so it pins what is there. Mutation-checked.
- Domain-keyed ADR index over 312 flat-numbered files, explicitly partial.
- Arc-close brief template, plus this arc's own brief filled in against it.
## Lanes 4 and 5 — two premises falsified by measurement, one of them mine
Math 4.2: baseline reproduced (correct=5 wrong=0 refused=495); all four named
cases traced to one seam with each gap isolated by one-variable probes. Then the
number that changes the recommendation: the gap blocking case 0000 affects 1
case in 500, the 'than' gap blocking 0001 affects 2. ADR-0251's prohibition on
per-case growth now rests on a count. No reader change made.
CGA: versor_condition is 0.22% of a turn, not the "~10x proof latency" I claimed
— that multiplied an isolated microbenchmark by a call count and compared it to
a single verdict's latency. The real cost is geometric_product at 33,986
calls/turn (~73%) via cga_inner in search paths. The obvious closed form is NOT
bit-exact (954/4000 in f32); backend.vault_recall's serial fold IS (3000/3000,
worst-rel 0) and is the correct target. cargo test could not run —
static.crates.io is denied by the sandbox network policy — so the Rust parity
question stays open and the typestate lane is carried forward, not shipped
uncompiled.
## Not landed: three lines owed to .github/workflows/smoke.yml
The CI smoke gate is narrower than the local one —
test_pack_draft_serve_boundary.py (ADR-0253 INV-33) has been local-only, unseen
because the parity pin checked one direction. The edit was authored and rejected
at push for lacking the `workflow` OAuth scope, so it is recorded as a named,
dated PENDING_IN_CI exception rather than dropped: the assertion still fires on
any new divergence, and a second guard fires once the three land.
[Verification]: pre-push gates all green — smoke 236 passed, warmed_session 10
passed, deductive 285 passed. Ratification 14, ADR index 5, CLI suites 10.
Grounding/epistemic sweep 741 passed 1 skipped. workbench-ui 598 passed across
73 files, tsc -b clean. capability index 11 passed, digest unchanged. Math
holdout correct=5 wrong=0 refused=495. Committed chain corpora byte-unchanged
after the tests that write to them.
Environment caveat: the repo pins requires-python ==3.12.13, which uv cannot
fetch for linux-x86_64, so `uv sync --locked` fails. All Python runs used a
scratch venv on 3.12.11 with declared deps — not the locked universe, not the
full ~12k suite. The pin was left untouched. Re-run on a 3.12.13 host before
treating this as merge evidence.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FduW6Krm3PPQv3P5iwBYtx
Shay