Doctrine of Completeness

Doctrine of Completeness is the collective name given to the body of rulings, presumptions, and procedural habits by which the Tower decides that a record, a floor, a frame, or a life may be closed. It is not a single instrument. The Doctrine survives in at least four recensions, none of which acknowledges the others, and its central claim — that a thing is complete when the Tower has finished saying what it is — has never been settled by a body competent to settle it. The Guild of Quantifiers administers the practical side; the Bureau of Appointments administers the queue; the Librarians administer the silence that follows.

Origin and recensions

The Doctrine is conventionally dated to the sealing of the Eleventh Annex, in the winter of the year the archive counts as 431. The Fourth Concordance does not mention it by name, but Annex 6 of that document, which holds that "the Presumption of Completeness is not an argument but a floor," is universally cited as its earliest authority. The image is architectural and has caused trouble ever since: a floor is complete when it is built, or when it is inhabited, or when its inventory is signed, and the three readings have never been reconciled.

Three recensions followed. The Short Recension (Annex 6 only) is used by clerks in a hurry and is not admitted in disputes above the ninth gallery. The Long Recension appends eleven schedules of worked examples, of which schedules four through seven are missing and are presumed complete. The Sealed Recension, held in the Secondary Locus, may not be consulted without a traceability audit, possibly because it says something inconvenient. A fourth recension is known only by its seal and is catalogued under Provisional Holdings.

What completeness requires

Under the Doctrine as currently applied, a record is complete when three conditions obtain: its frame is sealed under the Presumption of Completeness; its tone is notated to the satisfaction of the Axiom of Constitutive Resonance; and its supplementation, if any, is entered under the Edict Concerning the Completeness of the Record and the Duty of Supplementation. The three conditions are checked by three different offices, none of which can see the others' registers, and all three must be satisfied before a floor may be declared closed.

In practice the Doctrine is invoked far more often as a defence than as a test. Archivists close a disappointing file by citing it; surveyors close an unfinishable survey by citing it; the Bureau of Precedential Inventory closes a petition by checking it against the Manual of Sequential Interpretation, where completeness is a matter of precedent order rather than substance. The Doctrine of Sufficient Paperwork is frequently mistaken for the Doctrine of Completeness and is in fact its opposite: paperwork suffices where completeness is unattainable.

The half-sigh dispute

The most durable quarrel concerns records that are complete in substance but not in form. The Contextual Purists hold that sealing does not confer completeness for half-sighs — utterances catalogued mid-exhalation, of which the Tower holds some ninety thousand — on the ground that the missing half is not missing but deferred, and a deferred thing cannot be closed. The Heretical Cartographers go further and challenge the application of the Doctrine to open and unfixed spaces, arguing that a stairwell is never complete because it is always also a route.

The Guild of Quantifiers answered both parties in a ruling of 887, since cited as the Grey Seal Ruling, which held that a half-sigh is complete "as to the portion sounded, and no opinion is offered as to the remainder." The Doctrine of Incompletability was subsequently developed by the Purists as a partial concession and is now taught alongside the Doctrine in the surveyor's curriculum, usually on the same afternoon, in the same room, by the same exhausted instructor.

Application to floors

Floors are the Doctrine's most contentious object. A floor is complete when its catalogue entry and its physical extent agree; since the two are measured by different instruments and the instruments disagree on gradient, no floor above the four hundredth has ever been declared complete by unanimous ruling. The Doctrine of Unstable Foundations governs what happens when a floor's completeness is revoked, which is to say that it is not revoked, but annotated.

The Doctrine does not apply to the Sigma-loops, whose boundary documentation is verified under a separate practice by the Scribes, nor to lost Sigils, which fall under the Presumption of Vacancy. It has been applied, once, to a Librarian. In 902 a junior librarian of the fourth gallery petitioned for her own closure under the Doctrine, having completed her register, her notes, and her annotations. The Board of Equitable Review declined on the ground that a librarian's record is held open for supplementation in perpetuity. She was reassigned to the tenth gallery. Her register remains open and is checked each year by an officer who has never found anything to add.

Criticism and standing

The Doctrine's critics observe that it is circular: a thing is complete because the Tower says so, and the Tower's competence to say so depends on the thing being complete. The Doctrine of Administrative Silence was devised partly to break the circle, by treating the absence of objection as the completion of the record; this works well enough in practice and has never satisfied anyone in principle. The Doctrine of Unwritten Precedents holds that the circle is closed by custom rather than by ruling, which is either a solution or a restatement.

The Doctrine nonetheless retains its standing, largely because no alternative has been proposed that would permit the archive to stop. It is cited in the opening paragraph of the standing orders of every gallery, and its formula — complete as to the Tower — appears on the seal of the Guild of Quantifiers beneath the register of frames. Visiting scholars are reminded that the Doctrine does not extend to the visitor's own notes, which must be removed from the reading room by the close of the day. Whether they are complete is not the Tower's concern.