# AUTHENTIC INVERSION DOCTRINE

**Scope:** The authenticity constraint that governs every query this skill generates. Supports authentic reasoning -- does NOT supply canned inversions.

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## Why authenticity is load-bearing

Popper (1934/1959) grounds the demarcation: a meaningful test must present real risk of negating the theory. A query that always returns "consistent with prior finding" is not a test; it is a retrieval. The adversarial pass is the only component of RAM whose job is to risk negation. If it ritualizes, the whole producer architecture loses its falsification surface.

Nemeth et al. (2001) and Schulz-Hardt et al. (2002) show the empirical consequence: contrived devil's advocacy underperforms authentic dissent because readers detect the procedure and discount the objections. CSET (2024) documents the same failure mode in AI red-teaming -- adversarial output that looks procedural gets treated as procedural.

Maxwell (2013) supplies the methodological frame: "validity is not a commodity that can be purchased with techniques." You cannot buy disconfirmation by running procedures. You must reason as a skeptic would reason.

## What "authentic" means operationally

Authentic inversion reasoning answers four questions *before* any query is issued:

1. **Who is the authentic skeptic?** Not "a generic critic" -- a specific role with specific commitments (a replication-crisis researcher, a methodologist suspicious of measurement artifact, a domain practitioner who has seen the method fail, a meta-analyst who knows the publication-bias profile). Identify the role; reason from its priors.
2. **What world-state would have to obtain for the claim to be wrong?** State the boundary condition in terms the skeptic would use, not in terms the confirmatory finding uses.
3. **What alternative explanation produces the same confirmatory evidence?** Name it. Confounder, artifact, selection effect, common-cause structure, framing effect. The explanation must be specific enough to generate its own search terms.
4. **What replication / adjacent-setting failure is most plausible?** Name a concrete adjacent context where the claim is known to collapse or has not been tested.

The queries follow from the answers. They are NOT derived by negating predicates in the confirmatory query.

## Resourcing is not volume

Resourcing = (inversion-class coverage) x (saturation-on-disconfirmation) x (audit trail of authentic search effort).

- Coverage: every pre-registered inversion class exercised or documented non-applicable.
- Saturation: next query within a class produces no new disconfirmation *category*, not no new source.
- Audit trail: per-query skeptic-frame rationale recorded in the scratch artifact.

Query counts, time budgets, and token budgets are NEVER resourcing. Stopping rules that cite them are volume-floor regression -- the Librarian failure mode under a new name.

## What this doctrine does NOT do

This document supplies no inversion templates, no canned queries, no fill-in-the-blank skeptic prompts. Any template that could be applied without the four-question rationale would defeat the authenticity constraint. Queries MUST be reasoned per claim, per discipline.
