edge-case-safety-spans-creation-and-maintenance
OUT derived (depth 6)
The system handles edge cases safely across both temporal dimensions: at creation time, uniform revision covers all semantic edge cases (vacuous premises, asymmetric absence, empty antecedents) through minimal primitives; at maintenance time, contradiction resolution and staleness detection actively catch drift — no edge case is safe only at one point in time.
Summary
Edge cases in the reasoning system are protected at two different moments: when beliefs are first created, the minimal design means weird inputs like empty justifications or missing premises all flow through the same simple logic with no special handling needed; and as time passes, contradiction detection and staleness checks keep catching problems that emerge later. This means a tricky scenario cannot slip through by being safe only at setup but not during ongoing use, or vice versa.
Justifications
SL — Edge-case uniformity at creation (depth-5) combined with bidirectional self-correction at maintenance (depth-4) closes the temporal gap where edge cases could escape handling
Antecedents (all must be IN):
- edge-case-uniformity-follows-from-minimality — Uniform handling of all semantic edge cases — vacuous premises, asymmetric absence, empty antecedents — is a consequence of semantic minimality: because every edge case derives from the same primitives that drive deterministic core semantics, no special-case logic exists.
- self-correction-spans-creation-and-maintenance — The system self-corrects along both temporal axes: it detects and resolves active contradictions through lifecycle-safe backtracking at derivation time, and it detects and flags source material drift through conservative staleness checking over a belief's lifetime — ensuring beliefs are correct both when first derived and as their evidential basis evolves.
Dependents
These beliefs depend on this one:
- invariants-hold-across-origin-and-time — System invariants hold along every independent dimension: across all belief origins (human-initiated, LLM-derived, agent-imported) via shared minimal foundations, and across both temporal phases (creation-time edge-case handling and maintenance-time staleness detection) including all semantic edge cases.
- revision-coverage-requires-sound-propagation — Revision safety covers the complete two-dimensional space — the provenance axis (internal via comprehensive edge-case handling, external via defensive containment) and the temporal axis (creation-time contradiction resolution, maintenance-time staleness detection) — but this coverage is contingent on propagation correctly discovering all dependent nodes to complete revision cascades.