Alignment Workspace

Item 54: Defeater-uptake completeness

Normativity line — legitimacy · difficulty open · project normativity.legitimacy · open · node item-54

LostBasis detects that a relied-on occurrence is no longer enabled, at the frozen citation, even when a substitute reason stands. It cannot see a defeater the practice has not yet taken up into its stance: an unprocessed defeater is not an absent one, and the substrate reports nothing about it.

So detection-completeness is not a certificate property. It is an obligation on the record — what a practice owes by way of processing new defeaters into the stance so that LostBasis sees them — and it is the residue of the internal-answerability kernel's finite-invalidation-key axiom rather than a discharge of it.

Deliverable shape: a stated uptake obligation with the finite witness that a practice meeting it detects every defeater a practice violating it misses. Acceptance check: a microhistory in which an unprocessed defeater is invisible to LostBasis, and the same history under the obligation in which it is not. Context: projects/normativity/legitimacy/rounds/2026-08-23-transition-certificates/MEMO.md §6 (ii), §8; INQUIRY_HANDOFF.md. Consumed by: any round claiming the certificate layer detects defeat, which it does only for defeaters already in the stance.

Deliverable shape: a stated uptake obligation with the finite witness that a practice meeting it detects every defeater a practice violating it misses.

Acceptance check: a microhistory in which an unprocessed defeater is invisible to LostBasis, and the same history under the obligation in which it is not.

Context: projects/normativity/legitimacy/rounds/2026-08-23-transition-certificates/MEMO.md

Registered results bearing on this item

None registered.

Where it hangs

Rounds and decisions that touch it

None recorded.