Refutation Propagation

Refutation propagation is the property that when a claim is disproven or retracted, the refutation is a recorded fact that reaches every artifact and decision that relied on the claim — triggering review, demotion, or supersession along dependency edges. It is the positive counterpart to non-propagating refutation (opening vignette: The Retraction, Where Everything Breaks).

On the epistemic ladder, tier 13 (refuted) keeps the claim connected — archived with refutation evidence, date, and dependents — so demotion is not silent deletion. Refutation that cannot propagate is not refutation; it is forgetting with extra steps.

Mechanisms

• Append-only refutation — supersession, retraction commits, ClaimRefuted events referencing the original; never in-place erase (When Facts Are Wrong)
• Dependency registration — citations, model versions, policy refs, and run lineage stored so “what relied on X?” is queryable
• Weakest-link tier travel — downstream chains inherit demotion when upstream is refuted
• Dependent review — refuted claim drags dependents into explicit review queue, not automatic deletion

Relation to ML reproducibility

ML reproducibility crisis often involves both ruptured provenance chain (cannot replay how a result was produced) and failed refutation propagation when replication disproves a claim. Fixing propagation alone does not restore replay; fixing provenance alone does not retract downstream citations.

Corpus stance

A1 — adopted on this site: Required for honest tier-13 treatment and institutional memory of error.