Internal Consistency

Internal Consistency is the property by which a holding, document, or certified entity may be said to agree with itself. It is the Tower's foundational measure of validity and, by the terms of The Calibration Precedent, the only measure permitted to Metaphysical classification. An entity is internally consistent if no part of it contradicts another part of it, irrespective of whether any part of it corresponds to anything encountered on a stairwell, in a corridor, or on a floor.

The doctrine is not native to the Tower. It was received, in the main, from the practice of Marlo's tripartite rule, which holds coherence to obtain on three levels: Internal Consistency, External Consistency, and Procedural Consistency. The Tower has maintained the first, neglected the second, and delegated the third to the Reflector Guild.

Doctrinal basis

The governing statement remains concise. The Manual of Validation Procedure, 4th Edition, defines validation as "a certification that the holding does not disagree with itself in any particular material to its classification" (Manual of Validation Procedure, 4th Ed., §2.1). The Axiom of Material Coherence extends the principle to plausibility: a holding is deemed plausible where its internal consistency is sufficient to sustain the description entered for it.

Two Concordances bear directly on the question. Concordance 22, Clause 4, states that its own authority "ends where its internal consistency fails" — a provision that has been read, since the Reality Audits of the ninth cycle, as granting every holder of a Concordance the right to test the document against itself before obeying it. Concordance Alignment goes further, requiring that the content of the Third Concordances exhibit internal consistency as a condition of their alignment. The two provisions are not reconciled. Concordance 29, Annex 2, attempts a reconciliation and is itself internally inconsistent at Clause 7; the annex has been withdrawn and reissued four times and remains, by common consent, in force.

Administration

Certification is issued by the Office of Internal Consistency, which receives Notices of Incongruence on Form C-7b from Counter Cataloguers and ratifies them. Where a holding's consistency is disputed at the point of accession, the Office of Ontic Verification issues formal confirmation — although, by a provision of long standing, Cadre officers may bypass that confirmation entirely, a power exercised 211 times in the last recorded cycle and contested on each occasion.

Status is recorded under Status Psi, which certifies an entity's coherent internal logic even where that logic contradicts conventional experience. Stairwell Psi is the exemplar, and is cited in every introductory recension on the subject.

The Office of Internal Consistency does not maintain a Register of Consistent Holdings. It maintains a Register of Holdings Not Yet Found Inconsistent, and objects formally to any description of the former. The distinction was set out at length in the office's circular of the winter of the eleventh cycle, following a flood on the forty-second floor that damaged the lower shelves of the consistency annex; the circular is filed under the flood.

Relation to external consistency

Under The Calibration Precedent, a Metaphysical holding is not examined for correspondence with anything outside itself. External Consistency survives in the tripartite rule as a level to which the Tower is formally indifferent. The precedent has never been overruled, though the Bureau of Temporal Harmonization has twice petitioned against it, arguing that a holding inconsistent with its own earlier recensions cannot be internally consistent; both petitions were referred to the Division of Temporal Consistency and are pending.

"A thing may be false to the world and true to itself, and the Tower will catalogue it as the latter."

— The Calibration Precedent, Recital 3

The Ferroweigh dispute

The best-remembered failure of the doctrine is the Ferroweigh affair. In the eleventh cycle, a Counter Cataloguer named Halvard Ferroweigh submitted 38 consecutive Notices of Incongruence against a single holding — a corridor on the ninth floor catalogued as 14 metres long and entered on its own survey as 16 metres long. Ferroweigh argued that the holding was internally inconsistent and should be struck. The Office of Internal Consistency found against him, holding that the corridor's description contained no contradiction, only two measurements, and that the discrepancy was a matter of external correspondence, which was not its concern.

Ferroweigh then resubmitted, arguing that the two measurements contradicted each other. The office found for him, struck the holding, and issued a corrected entry recording the corridor as 14 metres long and 16 metres long. This entry has since passed six Reality Audits without amendment. Ferroweigh was transferred to the Structural Verification desk and did not submit a Notice thereafter.

Instrumentation and criticism

Assessment at Initial Assessment is conducted by means of the Protocols for Coherence Assessment, and any proposed protocol is itself first subjected to the Chen Protocol, a standardized checklist for the logical coherence of the protocol by which coherence is to be checked. That the checklist has never been applied to itself is noted in the margin of the master copy in the hand of an unidentified Librarian, together with the words "and rightly."

Critics within the Tower observe that the doctrine is unfalsifiable: any holding found inconsistent may be re-described until consistent, at which point it is certified. The Department of Cataloguing Consistency has replied that this is not a defect but the operation of the rule, and that a measure which could fail for reasons outside itself would not be a measure of internal consistency.