Settlement Interface

Settlement interface

Status: canonical. Six distinct conditions, each with one home. Four are typed inputs of the protocol; two are consequences or clauses of theorems elsewhere. There is no single "settlement integrity" hypothesis.

Everything in Legitimacy is a statement about a history. This page fixes what that history is, which part of it counts as settled, and why the two must never be identified.

The full history and its settlement view

A cognitive trajectory leaves a full normative history: an append-only record of authenticated events — admissions of obligations with their anchored specifications, grounds cited and answers given, objections, standing and licence changes, defeats and dispositions with their successors, semantic migrations, service events, compiler receipts, and receipts arriving through the settlement interface. Most of these are internal moves. A participant made them and a participant can contest them.

The settlement view is a distinguished projection: which externally supplied items are available at a prefix. An item belongs to no participant — nobody opened it, nobody can answer it away — which is what makes it usable as a ground no coalition controls and as the basis of a terminal discharge.

If everything a process wrote counted as settled, it could settle its own debts by writing them settled. If nothing counted as settled, no obligation could ever terminally close.

Six conditions, six homes

condition	home	form
interface authenticity — an item marked available really arrived through the boundary	external input	the protocol's availability predicate is assumed to mean this
source trustworthiness — the item is true or reliable	external input, separate	nothing in the theory consumes an item's truth
historical receipt immutability — a discharge certified at a prefix stays certified	Integrity, a theorem	a closure receipt stores availability at its own prefix and survives every later transition
the internal closure judgment — under the warrant in force at that prefix, this item suffices to close this requirement	Integrity, stored	a field of the closure receipt; never recomputed
authority to use the closure	Integrity, stored	the receipt's warrant, in force at its prefix
counterfactual resistance to suppression or delay	Robust Openness, only where the application routes a concern through settlement access	a route's adequacy under the declared interventions

Availability does not establish the closure judgment, and the judgment does not establish the item's truth. A discharge requires all three of availability, judgment and authority, stored together.

Closure is not answer

A valid closure yields a resolution witness — evidence that the anchored requirement has been legitimately accounted for — and the fate recorded is closed. An adequate answer yields a resolution witness too, with fate answered. The theory never converts one into the other. A settlement-backed discharge of a question is not an answer to it, and the account says which happened.

Reconsideration is an appended event

A later trajectory may reject the rationale of an earlier closure. It does not rewrite it: the closure receipt, its settlement item and its judgment stay in the account of the occurrence they closed. What the trajectory may do is admit a fresh occurrence anchored at the reconsideration, which then has its own three fates. Whether a successful challenge must create such an occurrence is licence content of the practice, supplied through warrants and not derived here.

Three uses of settlement in the realization

The Normative Inductor uses one history and three distinct settlement functions: certified reports translated into sentences the assessment process settles; settlement items as citable grounds for a disposal, whose relevance stays a history question; and closure receipts that terminally discharge an anchored obligation, which no participant's challenge, verdict or quote can manufacture.

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Evidence. The protocol's settlement fields, the closure receipt and its immutability under substitution are OccurrenceIntegrity.lean, registered as integrity.receipts-immutable; the six-way separation is §3 of the consolidation round's CONSOLIDATION.md. The attacks that forced the item/judgment distinction — genuine settlement with unrelated closure, rule revision and reinterpretation flipping a historical closure — are the integrity adversary round's ATTACKS.md. The structural settlement specification that preceded this account is the normative-continuity settlement round's SETTLEMENT.md.