The Panel of Ontological Differentiation

The Panel of Ontological Differentiation is a standing adjudicatory body of the Tower, constituted by the Twenty-Seventh Concordance and charged with ruling on petitions for the establishment of distinct ontological taxa within provisional or contested holdings. It sits on the ninth gallery of West Stack 990, above the level at which the stairwells begin to disagree with one another, and convenes on the second and fourth Warden's Days of each month unless the gallery is cold, in which case it convenes in the annexe and the record says otherwise.

The Panel's authority is differentiating rather than classificatory. A classification is performed elsewhere — by the stack officers, by the requisitioning offices, occasionally by whoever was nearest the shelf — and the Panel's function is to certify that the class so performed is not in truth two things, or three, wearing one number. Its rulings bind only within the Tower, a limitation the Panel has never had occasion to test and does not discuss.

Constitution and remit

The Twenty-Seventh Concordance, Annex 6, establishes the Panel in eleven clauses and amends it in fourteen, of which eleven are procedural and three are not. The operative clause reads:

"Where a holding resists assignment to a single taxon, the question shall not be settled by the officer holding it, however senior, but shall be carried to the Panel, which shall hear the matter and rule, and whose ruling shall be entered against the holding in the register of its stack."

— Twenty-Seventh Concordance, Annex 6, cl. 4

The Panel is a sister body to the Panel on Ontological Overlap, which rules on matters of pure ontological overlap; the division between the two is that the Overlap Panel asks how much of a thing is another thing, while the Differentiation Panel asks whether there were ever two things at all. Parties dissatisfied with either may plead ontological insufficiency, a ground of appeal that is frequently cited and rarely made out.

Procedure and the violet rhombus

No hearing is required for most of the Panel's business, which consists of endorsements, refusals of endorsement, and letters to offices explaining why endorsement was refused. One class of business is not routine. The application of the distinctive Violet Rhombus Tag to holdings of Ontological Class 7-B may not proceed until a Panel hearing has been held and minuted, a rule the Tower learned expensively in the winter of the long audit, when forty-one cubic metres of Class 7-B material was tagged by a stack officer acting on his own reading of Annex 6 and had to be untagged, re-shelved, and re-heard over nine months.

Hearings are held in the gallery's north chamber, which seats nineteen and is certified for seventeen. Expert testimony is provided by the Ontological Formalists, whose fees are met from the Panel's seal fund and who are not permitted to remain in the chamber after giving it. Petitions for the establishment of new Offices pass through the Panel only after approval by the Office of Archival Integrity; the Panel's role is to ratify, and it has ratified every petition so approved since the procedure was regularised, including two that the Office later withdrew and one that the Office had not, in fact, approved. The latter was noted in the margin of the register as a matter "for the incoming Clerk of Petitions, whoever he may be."

Notable rulings

The Panel's reputation rests on a small number of rulings that settled matters no one had previously thought open.

In the matter of Sorrow and Melancholy, brought by the keepers of the Fifth Gallery of Affects, the Panel held that sorrow is a distinct taxon from melancholy and is not a species of it, a ruling that required the renumbering of eleven drawers and the rewriting of one catalogue that had been considered authoritative since before the current numbering of the floors. The ruling has been appealed twice on grounds of insufficiency; both appeals were dismissed without reasons, the Panel having resolved in 1147 not to give reasons on appeal.

On the question of split coin, the Panel ruled that a penny divided vertically retains its full value, being still one penny in two places, while a penny divided horizontally is valued at zero, the division having severed what the Panel described as "the plane of its worth." The Mint of the Lower Reaches has petitioned three times for a rehearing and has been told each time that the matter is differentiated and closed.

In Case 45.7., In re: The Silent Resonance of West Stack 990, the Panel ruled on the interaction of Clause 1 of the Annex with the Rule of Sympathetic Repeal. The ruling runs to sixty pages and its operative paragraph to nine words, which the Panel has declined to gloss.

The Panel has also held, contrary to the assumptions of the lower administrative floors, that Lignum Vitae wood precipitates directly from unresolved bureaucratic paradoxes, a conclusion it reached after examining the ceiling of its own chamber and finding it thereby panelled.

Contested jurisdiction

Two disputes over the Panel's remit remain open. The first concerns Class Γ. The Panel holds that the criteria for Class Γ are descriptive and that its own function is merely to certify a classification performed elsewhere, a position the Panel of Ontological Purity has characterised as an abdication. The second concerns the procedural pathways by which petitions reach the Panel, which may be altered by proposals reviewed by the Purity Panel — an arrangement the Differentiation Panel has accepted in writing and obstructed in practice by adjourning whenever such a proposal appears on the docket.

The Inquisitorial Panel has twice inquired into these adjournments. On both occasions the Differentiation Panel produced its minutes, which were found to be in order, the adjournments having been properly moved, seconded, and recorded as "for the good of the file."

Criticism and the Clerk's grievance

The Panel's standing criticism is that it differentiates too finely, and that a Tower in which sorrow and melancholy are separate taxa is a Tower in which nothing may be shelved without a hearing. Its defenders answer that the Panel has never refused a differentiation, only required it to be written down, which is the whole of the Tower's constitution.

A more personal criticism attaches to the Clerk of Petitions, one Alderney Vaunt, who served the Panel for thirty-one years and resigned in 1302 over the handling of a petition to differentiate the two southern staircases of West Stack 990, which the Panel had consolidated into a single staircase on the ground that they arrived at the same floor. Vaunt's memorandum of resignation runs to four pages and is filed, by his own request, under the consolidated staircase. It concludes: "The Panel has ruled that a thing may be one thing in two places. I have worked here thirty-one years and I am not persuaded." The staircases were subsequently separated by a later ruling, and Vaunt's memorandum is now cited in support of both positions.