Chamber of Deliberate Ambiguity

Definition and location

The Chamber of Deliberate Ambiguity is a chamber on Floor 301, accessible via Corridor 301-γ, maintained as a requirement under Article XIV of the Accord of Delineated Responsibility. Its purpose, as articulated in the Accord, is to provide a venue in which inter-departmental disputes may be heard without either party being obliged to state its position in terms the other can act upon. Supplement 12-C to the Third Concordance requires that such disputes, if unresolved within 72 Tower hours, be convened there. The chamber measures 11.4 metres along its longest axis and 6.8 metres at its widest. The ceiling height is recorded inconsistently: the floor's own inventory gives 4.1 metres, while the maintenance ledger maintained by the Office of Vertical Surveys returns 4.1 metres for the north half and declines to give a figure for the south half on the grounds that "the measurement has been attempted four times and the tape has come back with opinions."

Procedural status

Under Supplement 12-C, representatives from both departments must convene within 72 hours of an unresolved classification dispute. The chamber's defining feature is that no ruling may be issued from within it. Proceedings result in a record, not a decision. The record is then forwarded to the Librarians' Chamber of Review, which may or may not act upon it. In practice, most disputes reaching Floor 301 end when one representative, on reviewing the transcript, decides the matter is not worth continuing. The distinction between the Chamber of Deliberate Ambiguity and the Chamber of Deliberative Ambiguity on Floor 191 has been the subject of prolonged argument. The Floor 191 chamber is the officially designated location of the Symposium of Unanswered Queries; the Floor 301 chamber is a dispute venue under the Accord of Delineated Responsibility. They are not the same room, though visiting clerks have on at least three occasions reported attending the wrong one and being unable to establish which they were in until they checked the corridor lettering.

Historical disputes

The chamber's most consequential proceeding was the hearing of the Index Amendment Dispute of the winter of the Long Recension, in which the Index of Ambiguity and the office of the Provost of Precise Ambiguity each sought to establish which of them had authority over the classification of ambiguous entries. The proceeding lasted nine days. The resulting record runs to 340 pages and is notable for containing no sentence in which either party states what it wants. It was forwarded to the Librarians' Chamber of Review, which issued no response for eleven months. A second, smaller dispute — concerning shelf allocation on Floor 118 — produced a record of two lines and was returned unopened.

Contested interpretation

Scholars disagree as to whether the chamber's ambiguity is procedural or architectural. The position associated with the School of Ambiguity holds that the ambiguity resides in the room itself: that the acoustics, the lighting, and the arrangement of seating are designed so that no statement made within remains unambiguous by the time it reaches the record. The opposing position, associated with the Society for the Preservation of Ambiguity, holds that the room is ordinary and that the ambiguity is entirely a matter of how the record is kept. The Third Concordance supports neither reading directly. Supplement 12-C refers only to "a chamber suitable to the purpose," a phrase the Annex of Recursive Ambiguity has glossed as allowing considerable latitude in what counts as suitable. The Seventh Pronouncement of Dean Alastor V, recorded in the Ledger of Deliberate Silences, states that "a room in which nothing is decided has already decided everything," which has been cited by both sides.

Access and maintenance

Corridor 301-γ is open during standard Tower hours. Visitors are asked not to bring pens; the chamber's walls are finished in a material that records indelibly, and two centuries of annotations have been removed at considerable expense. Seating accommodates eleven. A twelfth chair is kept against the wall and is not to be used, though no record has been located explaining why.