post-merge terminology corrections in the frozen September checkpoint
2026-09-02 · settled · DECISIONS.md line 1403
Agent-decided, reversible. A scrub, not a research decision. After the naming audit merged, two residual uses of pre-audit terminology were found in the frozen projects/normativity/legitimacy/checkpoint-2026-09-01/ and corrected under the freeze policy's allowance for a scrub with a stated reason (2026-09-01, below):
SUPERSESSION.md§1, the Surface Fairness row: claim weighting → obligation weighting. The rest of the historical row is unchanged.CURRENT_THEORY.md§3.6, the commentary on Theorem F2: "divergent service fits a finite lifetime budget" → "divergent total enforcement intensity can fit within a finite lifetime budget". The mathematical statement is identical; what changed is that the frozen text no longer identifies service with the scalara_tthat the same audit separated from it.
No theorem, interface, status, or research judgment changed. Recorded also in the checkpoint's own PROVENANCE.md.
What was found and deliberately not changed. The audit pass was less complete over the checkpoint than over the wiki, and this scrub did not widen to repair that, because a systematic re-scrub of a frozen tree is a maintainer act rather than a cleanup. The remaining pre-audit vocabulary, for whoever rules on it:
- obligation-sense claim:
CURRENT_THEORY.md§§3.10, 3.11, 5;ANSWERABILITY_AND_SERVICE.md§§3, 4, 5;FINAL_AUDIT.mdQ7, Q15;AUGUST_TO_SEPTEMBER.mdPart B, "where the note is richer";STATUS_LEDGER.mditem 47;OPEN_PROBLEMS.md§2. - scalar-sense authority where
a_tis meant:CURRENT_THEORY.md§§3.9, 4;FINAL_AUDIT.mdQ2, Q16;ROADMAP.md§"no longer receive research energy";ANSWERABILITY_AND_SERVICE.md§3;PAPER_CANDIDATES.md§1. - article artifacts left by the rename ("a obligation stream"):
FINAL_AUDIT.mdQ1,PAPER_CANDIDATES.md§1.
Uses that are correct and should survive any such pass: normative authority (practical, standing, genealogy, authorized disposition, grants) and claim meaning a registered assertion, a theorem claim, or a traded proposition. Supersession rows naming a retired object by its retired name are the map and are not residue.
Rejected alternative: scrubbing all of it here. Rejected because it would make a cleanup PR rewrite most of a frozen record's prose, which is the thing the freeze exists to prevent, and because the two corrections above are the ones that were actually misleading about current typing.