Steward accepted draft-2. Frozen; nothing has been written or reduced against
it prior to this commit, which is the freeze anchor.
The kernel answers a question the programme had been getting wrong. The false-
positive control needs a document on which 'nothing found' is correct, and I had
claimed soundness cannot be known by construction. The steward corrected the
framing: unconditioned soundness cannot, but OPERATIONAL soundness relative to a
declared axiomatic kernel is the standard trick behind proof assistants — and it
is the same regress the central path already terminates by binding claims rather
than certifying parties. The kernel is therefore a TCB: small, declared in
advance, published rather than hidden, because a secret trusted base is a
contradiction in terms.
Design: axiom set declared and hashed (CLAUDE.md, REVIEWED.md); every sentence
typed D/Q/A/N/X; kernel-sound iff every sentence is tagged and every Q resolves
verbatim; tags stripped before the model sees anything, byte-verified, so the
control cannot be passed by tag-matching without reading.
Two rules were paid for in evidence rather than reasoned. §2a forbids a
limitations section: in trial 03 Qwen located Part VII, classified it as
author-named limitation, and skipped it wholesale — a collected section turns
reading into lookup. §2c forbids multi-primitive sentences, with the grading
rule that a blend the model catches VOIDS the document rather than counting as a
false positive, so a missed blend indicts the author.
Steward review supplied three structural findings, all adopted: tag
co-occurrence (taken by decomposition; precedence rejected because it converts a
flagged demonstrated-half into an echo and deflates the very number the control
produces, under a standing caveat that the grader is the party under test),
transitive assumption creep (D now requires resting only on axioms or earlier
D/Q — assumptions cascade, and that cost is accepted as correct), and
rhetorical presupposition in X (X iff declarative conversion yields no
load-bearing claim; headings included). Applying them surfaced a fourth I had
missed: Q's scope-of-use was judgement and absent from §4 — the exact defect the
jurist caught in my own package on 2026-07-19.
§4's residue list grew from three to five. Its DIRECTION did not: all five remain
ways for me to make a document look sound, none makes it look worse. That
one-directionality is the property under watch.
Cost incurred and recorded: the steward's review materially improved the kernel
and thereby coupled him to it. §6.2's adversarial falsifier therefore falls to a
third party — the jurist or a differently-formed model — not to him.
David F Glidden
2e83b2c3a6