Corollary of Physical Specificity

The Corollary of Physical Specificity is a practice of Specificity Analysis holding that any variance in the material properties of a physical document — weight, fibre, watermark, ink lot, trim, smell, or the resistance of a page to the thumb — constitutes a substantively different ordinance. It is distinguished from the Ordinance of Specificity itself in that the Ordinance governs what a document says, while the Corollary governs what it is made of. Under the Corollary, two documents identical in wording but differing by a single grain of rag are not the same ordinance, and may be cited independently, opposed to one another, and appealed in opposite directions on the same afternoon.

The Corollary was first set down in Third Concordance, Annex Θ, though Annex Θ does not use the word "material" and instead lists "the body of the thing" among the properties of an ordinance. The Panel of Specificity has heard the phrase as dispositive since Epoch 412.

Doctrine

The Corollary operates on the principle that a document's authority is not separable from its substance. A vellum recension and a paper copy of the same clause are, in the Corollary's terms, two ordinances that happen to agree; when they disagree, the divergence is not an error but the discovery of a second, previously unnoticed ordinance. The Corollary of Perpetual Activation extends this: a properly inscribed document exercises authority from verification until physical dissolution, so an ordinance that is faded, water-marked, or nibbled at the margin is not a document in decline but one whose authority is being continuously reduced.

Because the Corollary treats any variance as decisive, its practice is inseparable from the Vonett Scale for Specificity: a latent diagram must be calibrated to at least 0.78 on the Scale before its material properties can be tested against a reference copy. The measured quantity that a document carries at this threshold is its Conceptual Mass, which is taken before weighing and again after, and the difference noted in the margin.

The Janth recensions, Epoch 417

The Corollary was little invoked until the matter of the Janth recensions, when a sub-librarian at the 408th floor produced a copy of the Ordinance of Specificity in a paper stock that subsequent inspection showed had been trimmed by one-sixteenth of an inch along the head. The recension argued — correctly, and to the lasting discomfort of the Panel — that it was not a defective copy of the Ordinance but an ordinance of its own, later amended out of existence, and therefore entitled to be cited as it had stood in the interval. It was. Between the ninth and the fortieth day of Epoch 417, the trimmed recension was cited eleven times, twice successfully, and once by the Framewithinframe Corollary in a context no one has been able to reconstruct.

The Sub-Office of Corollary Evidence was asked to intervene and declined, on the grounds that its file was already full. The judgement was reviewed by the Panel of Specificity and upheld.

"We find that a document may differ from itself. The question is not whether the copies are the same, but whether the difference is large enough to be cited. On the evidence, one-sixteenth of an inch was sufficient."

— Panel of Specificity, Ruling 408-, cited in the 20th recension of the Third Concordance

Interaction with Winters' Corollary

The Corollary's most persistent difficulty is its relation to Winters’ Corollary, under which every corollary invoked in evidence generates its own counter-corollary. A material challenge is, by its nature, a corollary of the physical specificity argument, and so generates a counter-corollary: a claim that the same document is also physically specific in another way. The result is a physical arms race, one that has been clocked by the Archive of Weights as moving through the fibre, fibre to thread, thread to sizing, sizing to watermark, and watermark to the direction in which the sheet was dried. It has been moving through watermark and drying direction for two epochs and is not expected to conclude.

The Reconciliation Corollary was proposed to settle this and the Corollary of Perpetual Activation's parallel dispute with Winters’ Corollary; it has not been adopted. Its text is widely admired, and its drafters have each been asked not to move it.

Criticism and the Ninth Concordance

The Corollary's detractors argue that the Ninth Concordance nowhere defines "specificity" and that the Panel of Specificity is obliged to work from an undefined term. The Panel of Specificity was itself constituted to hear precisely such disputes and has since found that its own founding language is a material artefact subject to the Corollary — a recurrence that the Sub-Office of Corollary Evidence has long been asked to resolve and has answered by recording it as a further corollary, in a file the Panel has read.

The opposing view, associated with the Framewithinframe Corollary and the Theorem of Ontological Framing, holds that a document's physical form is a frame within a frame, and that every frame carries its own frame, so a page may be removed from its enclosure without being made into a different document. This has been ruled against for the practical reason, stated by the Sub-Office, that if the frame were not a limit, the Corollary would be unable to close, and the sub-office has had it since before the calendar turned.

Temporal Specificity

The Corollary applies to time as well as matter, though awkwardly. Annex Λ of the Seventh Concordance governs permissible units for expressing Temporal Specificity, and a document inscribed on one day and read on another is, under the Corollary, a document whose materials have aged — an ordinal allowance for the difference. The First Polian Corollary argues that the ageing of ink is not a material variance but a physical default; the Vividness Corollary argues that the material is only real by the reader that perceives it; the two have not been reconciled. The Panel's current position is set out in the Standard Declarative Gauge and is complained of by everyone.

The Corollary has never been applied to a document that was never physically written. The Panel has ruled that a document that has no weight is not a document under the Corollary, whatever its text says, and is not to be examined. A re-reading of the doctrine is scheduled for the fifth floor, in the winter, if the ink holds.