CROSSROADS METER
How much of the working hypothesis survives contact with evidence, competing models, and internal coherence tests.
NARRATIVE DISTANCE
How many inferential steps separate the irreducible ground from the conclusion.
RESOLUTION DEBT
Unresolved explanatory obligations accumulated by a narrative even after large amounts of information have been collected.
UNCERTAINTY ESCROW
Unresolved propositions are quarantined. They may generate questions but cannot be spent downstream as established facts.
WEAK SIGNAL SANDBOX
A holding area for symbolism, coincidences, timing, number patterns and strange correspondences that have not earned evidentiary status.
MODEL DRIFT
When a theory quietly changes its own rules or ontology in response to pressure instead of being honestly revised or branched.
NARRATIVE IMMUNITY
The social, professional, political or institutional cost of questioning a claim. High immunity may reduce scrutiny; it does not establish falsity.
NO BORROWED CERTAINTY
An unresolved proposition cannot be used as settled support for another proposition.
DISCLOSURE DYNAMICS
A lens for deliberate revelation, accidental leakage, partial disclosure, declassification, normalization, archival recovery and apparent hiding in plain sight.
SOURCE DNA
The genealogy of a claim: commentary → reporting → prior reporting → witness, document, image, dataset or other original source.
GROUND CONTACT
How much of the model rests on facts or observations that survive when interpretations and conclusions are stripped away.
SPECULATION LOAD
The cost imposed by unsupported bridges, rescue mechanisms, model drift, and certainty that outruns evidence.
PATTERN RECOGNITION LAYER
Recognizes the structure of a research claim and surfaces adjacent frameworks even when the researcher never names them explicitly.
INSTITUTIONAL SWAY AUDIT
Maps funding, permits, publication, prestige, affiliation and career incentives that may shape a field without assuming coordinated fraud.
ACCESS DEPENDENCY
Measures how much a claim depends on objects, archives, sites or datasets whose direct inspection is controlled by a limited group.
CONSENSUS SUPPLY CHAIN
Traces apparent expert agreement back to genuinely independent primary observations and collapses repeated citation ancestry.
KNOWLEDGE EXTINCTION
A crossroads for lost knowledge: deliberate suppression, disaster, secrecy, oral loss, language loss, obsolescence, restoration, or simple failure to transmit.
RECONSTRUCTION TRANSPARENCY
Separates original material from casts, composites, restoration, inferred missing portions and public-facing reconstruction.