GCTS is designed for environments where evidence is limited, contradictory, controlled, or strategically curated. The central discipline is simple: absence has structure.
Absence States
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Absence of evidence | No available supporting evidence has been found |
| Evidence of absence | An expected record or observation exists and affirmatively negates the claim |
| Inaccessible evidence | The record may exist outside the current access path |
| Sealed evidence | The record exists or plausibly exists under restricted access |
| Withheld evidence | Non-production is more likely under a withholding world than under benign missingness |
| Destroyed evidence | The record existed or was expected and is no longer available |
| Not-generated evidence | The record should not be expected to exist |
| Unknown access | Current evidence cannot classify the access state |
Only evidence of absence can directly penalize a claim as absent. Other states usually create access uncertainty, record contingencies, or competing worlds.
Access Features
For each expected record, GCTS models:
- who owns it;
- who controls production;
- whether ordinary procedure would generate it;
- whether the event should be observable by that record system;
- whether the record was requested, produced, refused, partially produced, contradicted, destroyed, sealed, delayed, or unavailable;
- confidence in the access-state classification.
Incentive Features
Institutional incentive profiles model:
- control over records or testimony;
- reputational, legal, financial, operational, or political exposure;
- incentive to disclose;
- incentive to conceal, delay, narrow, or frame evidence;
- expected penalty if concealment is detected;
- prior source reliability.
Incentives affect missingness likelihood, source quality, and world energy while leaving proof to evidence and rules. Claims still require evidence and rules.
Suppression Discipline
The system should infer strategic withholding only when several conditions line up:
- a record was expected to exist;
- a responsible actor plausibly controlled it;
- the access path was legitimate or ordinary;
- non-production is less likely under benign missingness;
- the hypothesis reduces contradiction or explains access asymmetry without excessive unsupported complexity.
Unsupported suppression hypotheses should increase parsimony penalty.
Selective Production
Adversarial environments often produce some records while withholding, narrowing, delaying, or reframing others. GCTS should treat partial production as an observed production state with remaining access limits.
Examples:
- A roster is produced but the incident report is not.
- A policy is produced but the compliance log is not.
- Metadata is produced but content is withheld.
- A summary is produced but source records are not.
- A record appears only after an initial nonresponsive response.
Selective production can support some claims while increasing access uncertainty around others.
Output Requirements
Any report involving missing or controlled evidence should state:
- which records matter;
- expected generation duty;
- observed access state;
- production response;
- confidence in the classification;
- whether the claim is
record_contingent; - what evidence would raise, lower, or resolve the claim ranking.