Potentialist

The term Potentialist designates an entity whose primary catalogue attribute is a state of not-yet-being, distinguished by persistent, non-teleological latency in which the fundamental reality of the entity is anchored in the possibility of its realization. The designation is a catalogue class, not an assessment of worth, and is applied by the Potentialist School under the authority of Concordance 19, Annex 2, which reserves the classification to entities that refrain from resolving in either direction for a period exceeding three annual reconciliations. Potentialists are neither absent nor present. They are, in the phrasing of the School's founding charter, "held in the ledger without being entered in it" (Seventh Concordance, Annex 1).

Definition and criteria

The classification is founded on four conditions, established by the Treatise on Anticipated Grounds (Year 745) and never since amended in substance. An entity must exhibit a persistence of latency — it must be plausibly coming into being and must continue to be so over successive audits; it must exhibit non-teleology — its latency must not aim at any particular realization, since a Potentialist that is known to be approaching a specific outcome is reclassified as Pending and removed from the register; it must maintain a documented anchor in possibility, usually a single clause of a Concordance that would permit its entry into ordinary catalogue standing; and it must not have been claimed by any other school. The fourth condition has caused more dispute than the other three combined, since the Literalist School has consistently argued that a thing not present cannot be claimed by anyone at all.

The School's own exemplar is The Unwritten Concordance, a document that is said to resolve all contradictions in the existing Concordances and that has never been produced, read, or conclusively located. Its Potentialist standing is not diminished by these facts; the School holds that they are the substance of its standing.

Administration

Potentialists are entered in the Registry of Latent Predicates, which the School has maintained since its constitution in Year 732 by the Seventh Amendment and the Seventh Helical Gallery, the latter functioning simultaneously as a place, a body of curators, and the nominal seat of the School. Each entry carries a latency grade from I to IX. Grade I denotes an entity expected to resolve within a year; Grade IX denotes an entity whose resolution is not conceivable under any current Concordance. The Registry's standing prohibition — that no entry above Grade VI may be read aloud in the Gallery — was imposed in Year 758 following an incident in which a reading clerk recited a Grade VIII entry twice and the record of the reading was afterwards found to have entered itself as an entry. The clerk was reassigned. The duplicate entry remains in the Registry and has since been graded VII.

The School also conducts Conditional Viability Assessments for newly nominated Potentialists, the most discussed of recent years being its assessment of The Door to No Floor, found viable in a conditional sense. The condition has not been published.

The grading controversy

Scholars of the Guild of Dormant Scribes dispute the entire grading scheme, maintaining that a latency grade implies a direction — that is, that every grade is secretly a prediction — and that the School has therefore smuggled teleology back into a category defined by its absence. In the Guild's recension of the Registry, published at the Annual Reconciliation of Inks of Year 769, all grades are omitted and entries are ordered by the date of their nomination only. The School has not accepted the recension but has not suppressed it either; both versions circulate, and citations rarely say which is meant.

"A grade is a promise wearing the clothes of a measurement. The School may keep its promises, but it must stop calling them numbers."

— Guild of Dormant Scribes, Recension of the Registry, preamble (Year 769)

The School's reply, drafted by the Senior Archivist Marlo before his death and appended to the Treatise in later printings, is that a grade measures the width of the aperture through which an entity might enter, and that an aperture is not a door. This reply is widely quoted and has settled nothing.

Notable Potentialists

Beyond the Unwritten Concordance and the Door to No Floor, the Registry's better-known entries include the Fifteenth Stair, a flight recorded in the surveys of the Cartographer-Scribes that descends from a landing on an unnumbered floor and has been nominated four times and assessed twice; the proposed Eighth Silent Choir, whose admission was opposed by The Silent Choir on the grounds that a choir not yet assembled cannot be silent and therefore cannot be a choir; and the Forty-Second Amendment, which was ratified in Year 733, has never been enforced, and is nevertheless maintained on the register on the argument that an amendment unenforced is an amendment not yet made.

The Registry's index further lists some nine hundred entries of Grade V or below that have never been examined individually. The School's practice is to re-audit one hundred of these each reconciliation, beginning always with the lowest-numbered unexamined entry. In the whole history of the Registry no audit has ever been completed, because each audit produces more latent predicates than it resolves. The School regards this as evidence of the category's soundness rather than a failure of method.

See also

• Potentialists
• Potentialist School
• Registry of Latent Predicates
• Treatise on Anticipated Grounds