Working session: take silence apart

NEITHER is the most frequent answer of formalized law and the most frequent reason to take the system for broken. Silence has three causes, and the answer always says which of them is yours. This page is about where to look.

Facts were missing

Sign: whyNot has rules, and their premises have status DEPENDS marked “depends on an unbound variable”, or NEITHER. The rule is ready to fire; it has nothing to read.

What to do: submit facts from factsTemplate of the same rule. Do not invent them: law_rules already said which ones.

The rule read the facts and did not fire

Sign: whyNot has the same rules, but the fact premises are TRUE_ONLY and one of the guards is FALSE_ONLY. That is how our answer on forty-five minutes looked: “45 is less than 30” was refuted.

What to do: nothing. That is a substantive answer: the act has no norm that would give the opposite conclusion, and the law is silent on your case. Pass NEITHER as it is. If you need “the break is sufficient” as an established fact, that norm is not in the formalization, and that can be checked by search.

The norm is not in the model

Sign: whyNot is empty, rulesApplied contains only background rules, and law_search on the sense of the question finds neither a predicate nor a rule in the needed act — only text fragments. Formalization of an act is built to different depths, and its measure stands in the package heading in law_packages.

What to do: say that the question is outside formalized law. That is not the same as “the law is silent”: in the first case the norm is not in the model, in the second it is there and does not yield a conclusion. They must not be mixed, and the server does not mix them.

What else in the answer looks strange and is not an error

Extra rules in rulesApplied. In our answer, next to the thirty-minute rule stood rules about competence of bodies and about the calculation index. That is package background: normative facts of the act are derived on any question. The field derivedOmitted says how much derived material is not shown. Look at the rule that leads to your predicate — law_explain will name it.

Foreign acts in provenance.acts. The list of acts is the world in which the answer was computed: imports of the package, the calendar, doctrinal dictionaries whose fragmentCount is zero. The jurisdiction of the answer is the acts that fired, and it is named by the jurisdiction field. Doctrinal packages in the list are marked “outside the jurisdiction of a state — doctrine”.

missingInputs empty on NEITHER. That field is about inputs without which computation is impossible — a deadline policy, a calendar snapshot. Missing case facts live in whyNot, not here.

An error instead of an answer. An unknown predicate, a number where an entity was expected, an extra argument — all of these are call errors with a hint, not “not established”. The server distinguishes “you asked the wrong thing” from “the law is silent” on purpose, and the second is never issued as the first.

How to cite silence

Silence is as reproducible as an answer: programHash names the law, caseHash the facts, resultHash the outcome, legalTime the date. An answer “not established” with those four fields is the same kind of claim as “established”, and it can be repeated a year later.

Now we have an established conclusion. How robust it is and what proves it — explain and doubt.