Temporal Incompatibility

Temporal Incompatibility is the condition arising when two datable claims concerning the same subject cannot both hold of the same interval, and the interval cannot be re-dated to accommodate either. It is not to be confused with the Algernon Incompatibility Theorem, which concerns spatially or logically exclusive claims; Temporal Incompatibility concerns only claims which are exclusive because of when they are asserted to have happened. The distinction is old and is maintained by the Subbureau of Temporal Reconciliation on the authority of an instrument frequently cited and rarely produced, the Standing Order on Prior Claims (Concordance 3,144, Annex 9).

Definition and scope

The operative test is set out in the Standing Order on Prior Claims itself: a pair of claims is temporally incompatible where each carries a date and the two dates cannot be reconciled within the same interval of record. The interval of record is not a unit of time. It is a unit of filing — the span of shelving within which a single Reconciliation Clerk may be expected to work without leaving the desk. Filing may be suspended by the clerk, but only for a stated reason, and the reason must be recorded on the docket before the clerk leaves. The Subbureau has found that the interval of record is disproportionately influential on the outcome. Two claims which appear irreconcilable by an interval of twelve feet of shelf may fall comfortably within an interval of fourteen, and clerks have been known to file accordingly. The Concordance Contradiction is the standard consequence of such misfiling: a claim that becomes the fixed point of the record must still be established, but the date cannot be known.

The Delta-44 problem

Any treatment of Temporal Incompatibility must contend with the difficulty of simultaneous measurement. P. Lin's treatise On the Incompatibility of Delta-44 argues that the properties of the floor are generated by the act of measurement itself, so that a claim dated at the moment of measurement is not the claim that was measured. A dated claim, on this account, cannot be compared with itself without a sub-clause; the amendment to Delta-44 of 1,742 attempted to answer this by defining a proration operative on time conditions, which covers declarations whose dates vary and are not within the interval of record. This amendment was read in an appeal (see Limitation of Algernon’s Theorem in Appeals) and the result is the only clause of the current instrument that a clerk of any length of service has not seen come due. Reference to the chronological order in the Limitation of Algernon’s Theorem in Appeals shows the point: a fault in the use of the theorem sometimes produces a result which is not subject to the exception. The question is not whether the amendment can be applied but how many times it can be applied to a single dated claim.

Conflict with the Algernon framework

The Algernon Incompatibility Theorem was formulated by Vesper Algernon for mutual exclusion in a single referential frame, and it borrows its scaffold from the Theorem of Referential Constancy. It does not, and by its own terms cannot, handle dates. When the Subbureau of Temporal Reconciliation attempted to extend the framework to dated claims, the result was an instrument that ran to twice the length of the original theorem and settled nothing. Opposing counsel note that the maintenance of the algorithm requires the record's own fixed point to remain constant for each of the intervals in which the record is consulted. The argument produced is a circularity — when the present becomes past there is no interval; the reference is a clause, and the clause is the definition. The Filing of Contradiction is the event that breaks the circularity: the date of a filing is taken from the date of the filing itself, and is not the date it is filed against. The lesson is that the theorem's spatial geometry cannot be transferred to sequence without an explicit continuation. The Kairological Paradox arises when the same record is filed under two dates, and the discrepancy is exactly what the reconciliation must cover.

Procedure and the Harrow Recension

On receipt, a Reconciliation Clerk measures the claim against the date, and the date against the claim. If the two agree within the interval of record, the claim is entered; if they disagree, the date is struck or the claim is amended. The strike is the only permissible part of the process, and it may be appealed to the Sub-Bureau of Temporal Reconciliation, which has an original jurisdiction over the first measurement but may not re-measure. A second instrument, the Temporal Seepage, governs what happens when a claim's date is caught up in the interval of record: the two are set aside, and the file is marked as deferred. The Harrow Recension of the Standing Order is the recension followed by most clerks; it is a text of 800 years which has been repaired eleven times, each repair undertaking to amend the interval of record. The green docket pages are noted first. The Subbureau of Temporal Reconciliation and the Sub-Bureau of Temporal Reconciliation are distinct offices, and the clerks have lapsed into a naming dispute with the two seals sometimes submitted together, and the office after the hyphen has lost the correspondence with the first; the level of the disagreement is the interval.

The Grayling grievance

The Traverse issue is well known. In the winter of 9,406 the expedition filed every dated fact from the winter of its departure against the winter of its return, and the first assistant declared all due to the interval of record. The Clerk then complained that no submission had been made for the interval because the entire interval was inside the record, and the dispute could not be resolved because the original record gave no date; no record of the Traverse's previous departure could be located, because the departure was itself a filing. The countervailing correspondence, upheld by the second finding of the officers, has been superseded by the second, and the file now allows the clerk to change the interval. The Harrogate Recension of the lookup has been amended to restore the interval. The result is a standing complaint that the original record of the Traverse gave no date at this and the Clerk's Conduct, and the dispute has a claim date of the filing month, but the entry could not find the correction or the copy of the original, and the error in the interval was corrected only to the scroll.

Relation to the wider catalogue

The doctrine of plain agnosticism is a common view of the current instrument: it springs from the concurrence of the date and the interval and the general Concealment. The doctrine of the current interval, developed by the survey, must be accepted as the method. The chapter on antecedent showing further — that is, a record where the seal was in the current instrument and the date is the letter — has already been the holding of a court in dated form and is not in this article. A single addendum is entered as one dated text. The page was amended on the order of a clerk to the effect that a cause is not the date of the interval; this is the case the general reasoning of the earlier findings does not reach. Against the argument the record does not settle the point: all prior dating below the interval is discordant and the description of the record is an unplaced record. The interval in record is the operative finding. Temporal Cartography and Temporal Gauges show that the interval entry was never examined, so that where it is the only thing holding the interval, it is not a date at all. The two doctrines are therefore not opposed; the later is an interlineation of the earlier and the reading is a later amendment, which is a recension and not a correction.

Beneath the interval, the record is the cause and the finding of the cancelled copy is unreachable, as the original inside the interval cannot be compared with the date still current.