# Frozen Specification 1.4.5 corpus-development audit

## Decision

The Tree supports three reader lenses while keeping current and historical authorities separate:

1. **Current structure** — the 479-node / 1,461-edge Specification 1.5.3 graph and its current node-role colors.
2. **Pre-2026 evidence only** — the separately audited 406-node / 986-edge Specification 1.4.5 baseline.
3. **Development overlay** — the current graph remains authoritative while shared identifiers may carry a high-contrast mark from the frozen baseline; current-only or materially changed nodes remain neutral.

The 27 literature-comparison records belong in **Comparisons**. They are not averaged, elected, or propagated to create historical node colors.

## What the map claims

The historical map asks whether the **substantive claim or operation represented by a Specification 1.4.5 baseline node** was established, anticipated, or absent in the governed 2018–2025 corpus. It does not classify the complete Specification 1.5.3 graph and does not claim that today's symbol, quantified definition, or dependency neighborhood existed before 2026.

Every baseline node receives exactly one of four statuses:

- **Established before 2026** — the baseline node formalizes substance already established in the earlier corpus.
- **Pre-2026 antecedent; rebuilt in 2026** — a recognizable precursor exists, but the baseline operation or boundary was materially new.
- **New in 2026** — no substantive precursor for the baseline operation was located in the governed scope.
- **Technical scaffold** — a sort, parameter, closure label, bookkeeping device, or other formal support that should not be misrepresented as a separately datable theory claim.

Frozen-baseline accounting is **95 established**, **248 antecedent/reconstructed**, **2 new with no located precursor**, and **61 technical scaffolds**, covering all **406 baseline nodes**. The **986 arrows** belong only to the frozen 1.4.5 dependency index. They are not current 1.5.3 dependencies and do not assert a reconstructed pre-2026 architecture.

## Method

The audit used the complete full-text of all eight governed works (about 120,000 words after extraction). It retained the existing protocol's core safeguards:

1. Fix the audited 1.4.5 claim or operation boundary before searching.
2. Use marker searches only to retrieve passages; never score from a keyword hit.
3. Read the surrounding argument and distinguish full establishment from a partial antecedent.
4. Keep absence, antecedent, establishment, and technical scaffolding distinct.
5. Assign shared formal nodes by a governed claim/operation family, not by the potentially conflicting histories of the 27 comparison constructs.
6. Validate one-and-only-one coverage of the frozen 406-node baseline and keep its ordinal edge identifiers separate from the current graph.

The governed source is `governance/pre2026/FULL_TREE_CORPUS_FAMILIES.json`. It records the family boundary, historical status, evidence rationale, locators where available, and the principal 2026 change. Frozen comparison and Tree inputs are retained beside that source. The current runtime resolves historical `G-E####` identifiers only through the frozen 986-edge index; it never indexes them into the 1,461 current edges.

## Local Plurality correction

**Local Plurality is not treated as an axiom.** The non-prescriptive scope removes any theory-authorized verdict about which moral output is correct, and Scope §0.10 rejects compulsory global closure. That scope position permits multiple valid represented perspectives without adding a separate constitutive axiom.

The formal plurality machinery still does real downstream work and therefore remains in the theory:

- `PluralPair_s` states what counts as multiple admissible output tokens about one case.
- comparison-readiness and alignment state when those outputs can be directly compared;
- conflict predicates state when aligned outputs oppose one another;
- `PolyphonicPair_s` and `Polyphony` classify the stricter bridged-conflict subset;
- the registered constructions witness both Polyphony and unaligned plurality.

This is a reduction in **independent commitments**, not a deletion of definitions, distinctions, or empirical reach.

## Corpus coverage

The governed corpus contains W1 (2018 dissertation), W2 (2020 article), W3 and W4 (2021 articles), W5 (2022 Polyphony commentary), W6 (2024 clean manuscript), and W7–W8 (2025 essays).

The full-Tree pass supplements rather than invalidates the earlier 27-construct provenance audit. The earlier artifact still answers a different question: how selected current NDT constructs developed across particular in-scope works.

## Limits

- This is an audit of the governed corpus, not of unpublished thoughts or missing documents.
- “Established before 2026” concerns substantive ancestry, not literal symbol identity.
- “Antecedent” is intentionally conservative: it does not imply that the current operation already existed.
- A baseline node-level status does not propagate to its incident edges or automatically classify a same-named current node.
- The historical audit is not a complete audit of current Specification 1.5.3.
- The Formal Specification and Scope & Commitments remain authoritative for current theory content.