Simulated Interrogatory

Simulated Interrogatory is the procedural instrument by which the Dialogical School poses questions to holdings that cannot be questioned directly. A simulated interrogatory is not an interview and is not conducted with the holding present; it is a written question, submitted in triplicate to the Office of Reciprocal Citation, which answers on the holding's behalf according to protocols first set out in the Third Concordance and subsequently narrowed by the Fifth Concordance. The practice is preparatory under Article 7 of the Twelve Citing Concordances and is therefore non-binding, though the Office has never declined to answer and the answers have never once been revised.

Origin

The instrument arose from a practical difficulty recorded in the Chamber of Unanswered Questions. That archive contains several million interrogatories submitted to objects, places, and documents that could not respond, either because they were inanimate, because they had been deaccessioned, or because the question had been addressed to a floor rather than to a thing. The earliest answered specimen, catalogued as Interrogatory 1 (Floor 340, winter of the year the north stairwell was closed for repairs), asks of a deaccessioned ledger whether it considered itself complete. The Office's response, in full, reads: "It did not, and this was the reason for its withdrawal."

Later recensions regularised the form. By the time of the Fifth Concordance an interrogatory required a named subject, a question of no more than forty words, and a declaration of the questioner's standing, the last of which is checked against the register of the Functionalist School and the Intentionalist School before the question is logged. Questions exceeding forty words are returned unopened; the return slip does not explain why.

Procedure

A submitted interrogatory passes first to a Reader of the Second Desk, who determines whether the question is directed at a holding, at a practice, or at a person. Questions of the third kind are held indefinitely, a category the Office refers to as "resting," and no resting question has yet been released. Questions of the second kind are converted into questions of the first by a standing formula, and the formula is not disclosed to the questioner, who receives instead a receipt bearing a spiral mark and a date.

The answering officer works from the holding's accession record, its citation history as established under Simulated Citation Mapping, and, where the record is thin, from the office's own judgement. Judgement is not distinguished from evidence in the answer itself, a point of long irritation to the Interpretivist School, which has twice petitioned for a marginal mark denoting inference. The petition was granted in principle by the Third Concordance, Annex 9, and withdrawn in practice after the Second Desk reported that every answer would require the mark.

Interrogatories concerning the Moth-Wing Aspen form the largest single class of submissions, chiefly because the tree's structural status under Section 42 of the Botanical Concordances invites questions about load-bearing that no surveyor has been able to settle. The Office's standard reply to such questions has been in circulation, unchanged, since Floor 190 was renumbered: "The Aspen bears what it is asked to bear."

Dispute over the Witness Clause

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the Witness Clause of the Fifth Concordance, which provides that a simulated interrogatory "shall be answered as the holding would answer, were answering permitted." The Functionalist School reads this as a constraint on method: the answering officer must reconstruct the holding's likely reply from its function and use, and may not introduce matter foreign to that function. The Intentionalist School reads it as a constraint on intention: the officer must recover what the holding, if it had an intention, would have meant, which the School maintains is recoverable from accession records and from the manner of the holding's original cataloguing.

The Office of Reciprocal Citation has declined to adopt either reading, on the ground that adopting one would require it to state which it had adopted. In a minute of the Fourth Session, the Office recorded that "the question of the Clause is itself a question of the third kind," and there the matter rests, having rested since before the present Undersecretary's appointment.

Notable Incidents

In the winter of the year the north stairwell was closed for repairs, a clerk of the Dialogical School named Orvin Sallow submitted four hundred interrogatories in a single afternoon, each addressed to the same door on Floor 340, each asking whether it opened inward or outward. The Office answered all four hundred identically and without variation, and Sallow's subsequent complaint that the answers were "unresponsive to the question as asked" was upheld by the Concordance on Procedural Grievance on the technical ground that the Office had answered a question it had itself converted. The door was subsequently removed from the register of holdings, which resolved the grievance and left the question open.

A second incident, less formally recorded, concerns a stack of interrogatories submitted to the Contest of the Redundant Gate and answered by a junior officer who had not read the Contest's file. The answers were accepted by all parties and are now cited in the Contest's own proceedings, which has led the Librarians to observe that an answer, once inscribed, is a fact of the archive regardless of the reasoning that produced it. The Axiom of Unstated Premise is frequently invoked at this point in the argument, and frequently disputed.

Form and Filing

Interrogatories are submitted on Form 31-A, the same instrument required for entries in the Atmospheric Registry, a duplication the Office has never explained and the Registry has twice protested. Completed forms are filed in the Chamber of Unanswered Questions whether or not they have been answered, on the reasoning that an answered question is a question no longer unanswered and therefore belongs there permanently. Pencil is not accepted. The triplicate copy is retained by the questioner and must not be annotated, corrected, or folded along the spiral mark.