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.
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