Records

Everything Umwelt knows is a record, written once and never edited. There are four kinds:

• Fact: canon, what is true in the world. A Fact is not anyone’s knowledge: knowing that Bob is the thief requires a Holding.
• Holding: a claim held by a holder (an agent or a group), with:
  • an attitude: knows, believes, suspects or remembers;
  • an acquisition, how the holder came to hold it: witnessed (at an event), told-by (another holder, possibly repeating one of their own Holdings, honestly or deceptively), evidence, inferred (from other records) or authored;
  • a confidence between 0 and 1;
  • an accessibility: available, or suppressed / inaccessible for knowledge the holder has but cannot reach (a repressed memory, something forgotten for now). Such Holdings are withheld: reads leave them out unless asked for them;
  • optional free text, and optional secrecy: who the holder may share it with.
• Awareness: a holder knows that an entity exists, and nothing else about it.
• Disposition: how a holder stands toward a target along a named dimension (trust, fear, affection), with a value. Dispositions are directional: what Ana feels toward Bob says nothing about what Bob feels toward Ana.

A belief that contradicts canon is still a valid Holding. Umwelt keeps it and reports the contradiction (contradictions); it never corrects it.