Inertialist School

The Inertialist School is a body of cataloguing doctrine holding that a subject, once entered, tends to remain entered — that catalogue entries possess a quality the school calls persistence, by which they resist revision, relocation, and in most documented cases, removal. The School was constituted by Fifth Concordance, Annex 9, in Year 211, though its partisans maintain that the doctrine is merely the written form of a practice as old as the Functionalist School, and its opponents maintain that it is merely a clerical excuse. Both positions are on file.

Inertialism is chiefly distinguished by its account of what happens when a catalogue is corrected. Where the Ontological School treats correction as a return to the thing itself, the Inertialist treats correction as a collision between two entries, the incoming and the incumbent, in which the incumbent enjoys what Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, calls "the advantage of prior occupation." The school does not deny that corrections occur. It denies that they occur cheaply.

Origins and the Ferryman Question

The School's founding case is the so-called Ferryman Question, entered on Floor 2144 in the winter of Year 208. A subject had been catalogued under a name later found to be a mis-transcription of a different name entirely. The emending clerk, Ovart Behn, submitted the correction three times; each time it was returned with the annotation "entry extant," which he took at first for an error and later for a verdict. His fourth submission, a closely argued memorandum of nine leaves, was returned with the annotation "entry extant and settled."

Behn's grievance — that an entry had been defended not by argument but by continuing to exist — became, within three years, a doctrine. He is recorded as having said, before the Assembly of Recensions in Year 211: "I did not object to the error. I objected to its furniture." The phrase is carved above the door of the school's reading room on Floor 2144, though the room has since been reassigned and the door is no longer used.

Relation to Other Schools

The Inertialist School is a declared rival of the Sceptical School, which holds that no entry may be trusted that has not been re-derived from first principles at least once per recension. Inertialists regard this as very nearly a waste of the Tower. The two schools have exchanged formal objections continuously since Year 219, and the file of these objections is itself an entry that neither school will permit to be closed.

Relations with the Proceduralist School are warmer but complicated. The Proceduralists approve of Inertialism's insistence that entries have histories; they object to its conclusion that histories have weight. A joint statement of Year 241, Eleventh Concordance, Annex 6, describes persistence as "a fact about clerks, not about subjects" — a sentence the Inertialists have never formally answered and never stopped quoting.

There is also a longstanding and somewhat personal dispute with the School of Literal Accountability, whose auditors have twice attempted to strike Inertialist entries on the ground that an entry defended by its own existence cannot be audited. The auditors' reports are on file. So are the entries.

Persistence Measurement

Since Year 233 the School has assigned each entry a persistence rating, recorded in the margin of the floor register in a small hand and revised only under protest. The scale runs from I to IX. A rating of I indicates an entry that has been relocated without objection; a rating of IX indicates an entry that has survived three recensions, a change of floor, and at least one formal attempt at erasure. Fewer than four hundred entries in the Tower are rated IX. The Inertialists keep a list. The list is rated IX.

Ratings are not, the School is careful to say, a measure of truth. They are a measure of how much argument a correction will require, which the School considers the more useful figure. A Latent Structure survey of Year 258 found the ratings to be reproducible to within one grade in eighty-one per cent of cases, which the School cites as vindication and its critics cite as a coin with extra steps.

The Hall of Extant Entries

The School maintains a small exhibition on Floor 2144 consisting of entries that have resisted amendment so thoroughly that the amendments have themselves been catalogued as subjects. The principal exhibit is a single leaf, the original Ferryman entry, mounted under glass with its four rejected corrections arranged beneath it in chronological order. Visitors are asked not to lean on the case. The case has been leaned on.

"An entry is not a statement. A statement may be contradicted and be done with. An entry is a resident."

— Ovart Behn, memorandum to the Assembly of Recensions, Year 210

Controversy

The central dispute concerns whether persistence is a property of entries or merely of the clerks who guard them. Seventh Concordance, Annex 11, asserts that "no entry shall be deemed to possess qualities not conferred upon it by its cataloguer," which would make Inertialism a description of habit dressed as ontology. Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, three years later, asserts the reverse in almost the same words, conferring on entries "such qualities as accrue to them by duration." The two annexes have never been reconciled, and the School's position — that both are correct and that the difference is one of emphasis — is regarded by the Foundationalist School as the most elegant evasion in the archive.

A dissenting faction within the School, the so-called Light Inertialists, holds that persistence decays: that an entry unconsulted for forty years loses its advantage and may be amended without ceremony. The main body rejects this on the ground that it has never been observed, and the Light Inertialists reply that this is because no one has ever waited. The question is scheduled for review at the Assembly of Recensions in Year 301, a date the School chose itself and has not revisited.