INTERPRETATION LIMITED // SOURCE OBJECTS FIRST
R/IV Evidence Standard
Definitions governing evidence admission, claim support, contradiction, provenance, negative space, and findings in R/IV.
Evidence is not prose
An evidence object is a retained source reference or preserved artifact with a persistent identifier and provenance. A model response, summary, query result ranking, or repeated allegation is never a primary source.
Admission
Human admission requires an exact locator, reviewed passage, clear support statement, and a boundary describing what the record does not establish. Authenticity, authority, independence, entailment, completeness, and contradiction remain separate dimensions.
Negative space
R/IV distinguishes not searched, not found, not digitized, not public, restricted, repository unavailable, destroyed, expected but absent, never created, proven not to exist, access dependent, and unknown. These states are not interchangeable.