Paradigm — anchor terms

These are the terms the essays lean on. Nothing here is stipulative rhetoric — every definition is meant to hold up under structural criticism, and every essay references at least one of them by anchor.

Relational structure

The set of entities together with the relationships between them, treated as the primary object of interest — not the strings, numbers, or tokens that describe it. All claims in this paradigm are claims about relational structure.Anchor · paradigm:relational-structure

Verifiable trust

A trust property that can be established by walking a graph of provenance edges from the claim in question to auditable evidence, rather than by inferring the trustworthiness of an opaque model. The unit of verifiable trust is the edge, not the output.Anchor · paradigm:verifiable-trust

Geometric reasoning

A mode of reasoning whose success criterion is preservation of structure under transformation. If the input is a relational graph, the output is required to be a relational graph in which every input relationship that should have been preserved is preserved, and the transitions between them are checkable.Anchor · paradigm:geometric-reasoning

Preservation under transformation

The formal condition that if entities A and B are related in the input, they remain related in every derived intermediate. Analogous to a homomorphism in algebra; a manifold-transition consistency condition in topology.Anchor · paradigm:preservation

Covering

A collection of local pieces whose union describes a whole space. In this site's vocabulary a federation of authority nodes is a covering of a shared claim space, with each node contributing one local chart.Anchor · paradigm:covering

Gluing condition

The requirement that wherever two local pieces of a covering overlap, they agree. Institutionally, the equivalent of "the policy and the case file do not contradict each other in the region where they both apply."Anchor · paradigm:gluing

Corroboration bound

The rule that the trust in a claim reached by n independent evidence paths is bounded below by the maximum single-path trust and increases sublinearly with additional paths. Trust does not sum.Anchor · paradigm:corroboration-bound

Federation as geometric object

The framing under which a federation of independent authority domains is not a network diagram but an atlas: an ordered set of charts and transition functions with formal compatibility conditions. Operational discipline (anchor immutability, dated-snapshot preservation, single-PUT deploys) becomes a consequence of the shape rather than a set of conventions.Anchor · paradigm:federation-object