Axiom of Conditional Reality

The Axiom of Conditional Reality is the foundational proposition of the Tower's cataloguing ontology, holding that a subject acquires reality solely by virtue of having been correctly entered into the ledger, and retains it only for so long as the entry remains uncorrected. It is distinguished from the Principle of Catalogued Reality — which grants conditional reality to the object of an entry — by attaching the condition to the entry itself. The distinction is narrow, and the dispute it has generated is not.

The Axiom is recorded in Sixth Concordance, Annex , where it is numbered -2 and set beneath the Axiom of Stratified Reality without any apparent editorial connection between the two. It reads, in the recension employed by the Department of Subsidiary Ontologies:

"A thing is, in the Tower, what the page says it is; and it ceases to be what the page no longer says."

— Sixth Concordance, Annex , clause 2

Text and transmission

Three recensions of clause -2 survive. The oldest, held in the Scriptorium of the Ninth Landing, carries the word says; the working recension carries shall have said; and a fragment recovered from a stairwell between Floors 431 and 433 carries a third formulation that has never been satisfactorily transcribed and is classified, unhelpfully, under the heading of Ephemeral Phenomena. The Reality Audit operates on the working recension. Its auditors are instructed not to consult the fragment, and most do not.

The Applicability Register

Because the Axiom conditions reality on the page rather than on the thing, a subject that loses its entry does not thereby cease to exist but enters an interval the Tower calls pending. A pending subject is real enough to be complained about and not real enough to be complained to. The reconciliation of such subjects is the ordinary business of the Reality Audit, which maintains the Applicability Register on Floor 188: a running tally of subjects that were, for a period, in the archive and are now held in abeyance pending re-entry.

The Register's oldest unresolved line dates to the winter of the year recorded only as 6-σ-4, when the Vault of Conditional Authority reclassified a holdings deposit of some eleven hundred objects and returned forty-two of them to the general floors on the grounds that their entries had been amended to describe other objects. The forty-two were not destroyed. Neither were they catalogued. They were placed in a corridor off the main descent, where they remain, and where visitors are asked not to count them.

Doctrinal dispute

The Axiom's principal rival is the Doctrine of Concordant Contradiction, which holds that contradictions between Concordances represent deliberate branches in a conditional reality tree rather than faults to be reconciled. If that doctrine is correct, then clause -2 cannot supervene on any single page, since a thing may be said differently in two places and both sayings must stand. The Seventeenth Concordance appears to acknowledge exactly this difficulty and resolves it by classifying the whole question as a Conditional Existence matter and declining jurisdiction.

A third position, advanced in an unsealed memorandum attributed to a clerk of the Bureau of Unfiled Admissions and never formally answered, notes that if the Axiom were true without qualification, the Axiom itself would be conditional on its own entry, and any correction to Annex would retroactively unsettle every finding made under it. The memorandum was stamped received on Floor 188 and has not moved since. Its author, identified in the register as Clerk Oren Vask, requested reassignment to the Vivarium of Conditional Forms in the following year and was refused on the grounds that his reassignment had not yet been catalogued.

Practical effect

Axiom procedures are invoked most heavily by the Department of Subsidiary Ontologies, which cannot open a subsidiary ontology without first entering it and cannot enter it without first establishing that it is real under -2. The circularity is handled by Provisional Reality, a state in which a subject is real for the purposes of the entry that establishes it and for no other purpose. Provisional entries are marked with the Provisional Sigil (Ψ) in the upper left of the page. Subjects under provisional reality are entitled to the protections of the archive and are not entitled to be described as existing. The two entitlements are administered separately, on different floors, and the clerks responsible have not met.

Holdings may also be submitted in advance of their existence by way of Form γ-7, "Declaration of Conditional Reality", the standard instrument of the Axiom of Documented Intent. A completed γ-7 is sufficient to bring a subject into provisional reality but not into the Axiom's full conditional reality, which requires an actual page. The difference matters chiefly to the subjects, who experience it as a difference in whether the lights in their corridor are switched on.

Corrections to entries must be entered in the hand of the cataloguing clerk and witnessed by a second Librarian. Erasures are performed in ink of a contrasting colour, so that the voided text remains legible beneath. A subject whose entry is corrected does not remember its prior description and is not informed of it. Where a corrected subject is later found to have retained some property of its voided entry, the matter is referred under -2 to the office of the Principle of Coextensive Reality, which has no procedure for it and refers it onward.

Status

The Axiom has never been repealed. It has been amended eleven times, most recently in a corrigendum to Sixth Concordance, Annex , that altered the punctuation and left the words untouched. The corrigendum is generally regarded as the amendment that settled the question, though as the Reality Audit has noted in three separate annual returns, the question it settled is not the one anyone was asking.

Clerks entering the Tower's service are instructed in the Axiom on their first descent and examined on it on their second. A candidate who answers correctly is entered in the register of the competent. A candidate who answers incorrectly is also entered, and their entry is subsequently corrected.