Committee for Ontological Review (C.O.R.)

The Committee for Ontological Review (C.O.R.) is the standing body of the Tower entrusted with the factual status of phenomena. It does not determine what is true; it determines what the Tower may proceed as though it knew. The distinction is old and, according to the Committee's own founding recension, "load-bearing at every storey above the seventh" (Standing Order of the Committee for Ontological Review, Preamble ii). The C.O.R. sits in the Reading Room of Floor 4,411, whose catalogue number is not sequential and has never been corrected.

Mandate and scope

The Committee holds that Committee Review proper may only be conducted on facts, and that facts are those items admitted as such by the Committee. This is not regarded as circular. The Committee's working note of Cycle 19, filed as an annex to Committee for Ontological Review Opinion 44, explains that the point runs only in one direction at a time, and advises readers not to walk it backwards.

Oversight of the administrative imperative of Ontological Decay prevention rests with the Committee, which counts it as its heaviest obligation and its least popular. The Committee also jointly supervises the Custodial Entity Registry, and is the body to which the Committee of Permanent Review reports upward — a reporting line that has been described in the Committee's own correspondence as "upward, and then further upward."

Instruments and publications

The Committee's instruments are its Opinions, numbered without regard for chronology, and its Opinions are the most cited and least read documents in the archive. The Committee for Ontological Hygiene was formally chartered under Committee for Ontological Review Opinion 881, the founding instrument of that sub-committee; the Hygiene Committee's later independence in matters of dust is not acknowledged by the C.O.R. and remains a live irritation within the Committee itself.

The Committee issues The Proceedings of the Ontological Colloquium, and it was the Committee that established the Ontological Class 7-B taxonomy. The 7-B classification is the subject of the longest single file in the Committee's keeping, most of which concerns a single entry that has been re-classified eleven times and described, at the last review, as "7-B, pending 7-B."

Jurisdictional conflict with the Sealing Committee

The Committee for Ontological Review has a persistent jurisdictional conflict with the Sealing Committee Review. The conflict is procedural rather than substantive: it concerns whether a phenomenon is reviewed before or after it is sealed, and therefore whether the Committee's Opinions attach to the phenomenon or to the seal. The C.O.R. maintains the former; the S.C.R. has, since the Concordance of the Ninth Cycle, acted on the latter. The result is that the Committee has on four occasions issued an Opinion on an object that was, by the time of signature, already sealed and therefore not in the room.

The Committee has not conceded. A note in the margin of Determinative Reports (Volume vi, f. 212) records the Clerk of the Sealing Register's objection that the Committee "reviews what is not there and calls it diligence," and the Committee's reply, entered in the same hand, that the Sealing Committee "seals what is not there and calls it closure."

The matter of the Naming Room

Disagreement persists over the Committee's treatment of the events of the winter of Cycle 41 on Floor 3,806, the so-called Naming Room. In that season a Clerk of the Committee — the record names Alder Fenwick, then of the second desk — issued a review of the floor's brass door buttons as "nominally inhabited." The review was returned within the day, the Office of the Registrar having held that door buttons are not phenomena, and the C.O.R. has since held that the buttons were not reviewed at all, the review being void ab initio.

The Committee for Non-Intersecting Jurisdictions has twice declined to hear the matter, and the deformed CommitteeĠforĠNon-IntersectingĠJurisdictions has said nothing, which is taken as its agreement. Fenwick's inspired set of the revised review is filed at Petitions of Ontological Precedent with the buttons' review copy, the buttons' brief, and the receipt, and the file is stamped "reviewed" on the last page, under a different seal. The preference for the seal is a matter of standing practice, the Committee having held that a document reviewed in the presence of a seal is reviewable regardless of the seal's own opinion.

Contradiction in the record

The Committee's own recensions disagree on the extent of its authority. The Concordance of the Second Recension (Annex 4) provides that no Opinion of the Committee may be read against the Concordance itself, which would make the Committee subordinate to the document; the Concordance of the Third Recension (Annex 12, unratified) provides that the Concordance may be read only insofar as the Committee's Opinions leave it open. Both annexes are cited in Petitions of Ontological Precedent as settled law, and the practice of the Committee has been to cite whichever is nearer the reader.

The Committee for Ontological Hygiene has filed a note on the question and the question has not been answered. Readers are asked to note that opinions, like phenomena, are reviewed only when a fact is present, and that the Committee's judgment on the matter is in the pending file of the Review of Floor Stability.

Procedure and the two-year rule

Applications to the Committee are made on the long form. A single application is reviewed once; where the Committee's finding changes between the sitting and the return of the form to the applicant, the finding is withdrawn and the application is re-sat before a panel of two, the second member of the panel being the first member of the panel and the panel's recommendation read into the file. The applicant is not informed which finding is operative, the Committee having held that a decision may not be disclosed before the Committee has decided which decision may be disclosed.

The two-year rule governs. The rule is not a rule about time: the file says "two years" because it has always said two years, and has not been corrected since it was first written. Two years is the period after which the file may be read, and the rule does not say two years from when.

"Where a fact is in doubt, it is not the fact that is reviewed but the doubt, and the review is filed under the fact."

— Standing Order of the Committee for Ontological Review, Preamble ix

Final grades are entered in the Office of the Registrar, where Clerk Fenwick's set, unreadable, is filed as the second door button. The complaint about it is marked "reviewed."