Certification of Contradiction

The Certification of Contradiction is the instrument by which a suspected contradiction is formally put before the Tower for adjudication. It is prescribed under Section 7.2 of the Third Concordance and is administered, in first instance, by the Contradiction Annex on floors between the four-hundreds and the six-hundreds, depending on which counting is in use. A completed Certification does not resolve a contradiction; it establishes that the contradiction exists in a form the Tower is obliged to answer. This distinction is the source of most of the difficulties described below.

The form itself is short. It consists of the holding alleged, the floor on which the allegation arose, the name and seal of the submitting Librarian, and a sworn statement that no prior Certification has been issued for the same contradiction. The last of these is the source of nearly all delay, since a contradiction submitted twice is not a new contradiction but a Contradiction Flagging on the original, and the two instruments travel by different routes and are filed in different colours of tape.

Section 7.2 and its recensions

Section 7.2 exists in four recensions, of which two are considered current by the Annex and three by the Chamber of Provisional Contradiction. The earliest, the Ash Recension, requires only the Librarian's seal. The Second Recension adds the countersignature of a supervisor of the floor concerned. The Third Recension, promulgated after the events on floor 1,146, removes the countersignature and reintroduces it in an annex that the Annex has ruled inadmissible while continuing to observe it in practice.

"No Certification shall be received that has not been witnessed by a Clerk of standing, nor any that has, unless the Clerk be of the Fourth Spire."

— Third Concordance, Section 7.2, Third Recension

The apparent contradiction in the clause has been defended as a deliberate safeguard and attacked as a transcription error. The Clerk of the Fourth Spire has declined, in writing, to comment on which reading is correct, on the grounds that the question is one for the Annex and not for the Clerks.

The witnessing requirement

A Certification must be witnessed. In practice the witness is the Clerk of the Fourth Spire, who attends the sealing and signs the sworn statement at its foot. The office has never been held by more than one Clerk at a time, and the present Clerk has attested to more than nine thousand Certifications since appointment, a figure that is itself the subject of an unresolved Certification.

Attempts by the Contradiction Librarian corps to witness their own Certifications were ruled irregular in YSP 731, on the reasoning that a Librarian cannot swear to the non-existence of a contradiction they have themselves alleged. The ruling was overturned in YSP 733 and reinstated in YSP 734 under a further recension whose text has not been located. The Contradiction Audit of YSP 902 recorded the position as "unsettled, and observed."

Where the Certification leads

Once sealed, a Certification enters the adjudication procedure set out in the Contradiction Protocol. The contradiction is assessed under the Contradiction Protocolseverity Classifications and, if it survives assessment, loaded into the active record by Contradiction Loading. Chronic contradictions — those surviving three successive audits without amendment — are entered upon certification of chronicity into the Ledger of Unresolvable Antinomies and thereafter fall under the purview of the Division in perpetuity.

Certification does not guarantee loading. Of the four hundred and twelve Certifications sealed in the winter of YSP 887, one hundred and six were suspended pending a Declaration of Contradiction from the originating floor, which in thirty-one cases had ceased to exist as a numbered floor in the interval. The Annex has never established the correct procedure for a Certification arising from an unnumbered floor, and the question is presently held open under the Protocol for Cross-Floor Contradiction, Annex 9.

Scholarly dispute

The chief dispute concerning the Certification is whether it is constitutive or declaratory — that is, whether a contradiction exists only from the moment it is certified, or whether certification merely records a contradiction that was always there. The Annex maintains the constitutive view, citing clause 7.2 as cited in the matter of Vertigo Endurance Certification, in which the adjudicator held that an uncertified contradiction has no standing to be refuted or affirmed.

The opposing view, advanced by a minority of the Contradiction Librarians and notably by the compiler of the Polvek Contradiction, holds that a contradiction is a property of the record and not of the form, and that the Tower's floors contained contradictions for centuries before the form existed. Under this reading, the Certification is a courtesy extended to the Tower by those who submit it. The dispute has not been resolved and has itself been certified twice; both certifications were returned unopened.

Maintenance

The forms are printed in the Annex scriptorium on stock of a single weight, and are not to be folded. Folding invalidates the seal and necessitates a fresh Certification, which may not be issued until the folded form has been surrendered and destroyed. The Clerk of the Fourth Spire keeps a tally of surrendered forms in the margin of the current register, and has done so since YSP 764.