Skip to content
dent8dent8

0007: Authority-as-Entrenchment Arbitration

Date: 2026-06-26

Status

Section titled “Status”

Accepted; implemented in dent8-core (supersession arbitration + canonical hard-alarm + non-resurrection proof), earned entrenchment v0 (authority-weighted corroboration + the unearned_supersessions subject-level audit), and survived-challenge recording (ADR 0015: ChallengeRejected events + Sybil-resistant FactState.survived_challenges, plus the opt-in earned-supersession gate). Remaining future: uniqueness-constrained predicates and transactional store-layer enforcement.

Context

Section titled “Context”

Authority-weighted supersession is dent8’s headline differentiator versus Graphiti’s recency-only contradiction resolution (“consistently prioritizes new information”), and the cleanest mitigation for MINJA-style memory poisoning (a privilege-less user must not override a high-authority fact). Originally apply_event applied every Superseded/Contradicted event identically and ignored Authority entirely — the differentiator was a design fact with no code. This ADR’s decision is now built.

Decision

Section titled “Decision”

Make Authority an epistemic-entrenchment ordering that arbitrates conflict resolution in the core fold, separate from Confidence:

  • A fact.superseded whose replacing fact does not strictly out-rank the superseded active fact is rejected (or down-ranked), not silently applied. This operationalizes the invariant “higher-authority supersession requires an explicit basis.”
  • A fact.contradicted against an AuthorityLevel::Canonical (or uniqueness- constrained predicate) fact is a hard alarm (a new TransitionError), not a soft transition to Contested — the LFI “gentle-explosion” tier.
  • Confidence never substitutes for Authority in arbitration; a high-confidence low-authority fact cannot override a low-confidence high-authority one.

Consequences

Section titled “Consequences”

Positive:

  • Turns the headline differentiator into enforced behavior testable against MINJA/PoisonedRAG fixtures.
  • Gives the eval suite a consistency_required fixture family.

Negative:

  • Arbitration in the core changes apply_event’s contract; needs new TransitionError variants and careful property tests so legitimate supersession still works.
  • Authority is asserted, not proven — this defends against low-privilege injection, not a compromised high-authority actor (see threat-model.md).

Follow-Up

Section titled “Follow-Up”
  • [DONE] Implemented in dent8-core apply_event (InsufficientAuthority, CanonicalContradiction), with unit tests + an exhaustive 5×5-lattice non-resurrection test and a #[cfg(kani)] harness.
  • [DONE] Earned entrenchment v0: authority-weighted corroborating_sources / corroboration_at_or_above on FactState, and SubjectProjection::unearned_supersessions (AuthorityDowngrade, WeakerEntrenchment — now weighing earned entrenchment = corroboration + survived challenges, ADR 0017; Sybil-resistant), tested.
  • Enforce the arbitration transactionally in the store layer once the Postgres adapter exists (load incumbent, lock, arbitrate, append atomically).
  • [DONE] Record rejected supersession attempts — the “survived-challenge” half of earned entrenchment (research/novelty.md rank 3) is built as ADR 0015. Still open here: uniqueness-constrained-predicate flags for the LFI tier.
  • Grounded in belief-revision.md and ADR 0005.