The Event and the Inference: Exposure, Debt, and the Limits of the Public Adjudication of Provenance

Some traditions claim not merely to respond to something they did not produce, but to be correctable by it. This paper asks neither whether that something exists nor whether the tradition is right; it asks what would make such a claim examinable from outside the community. Its central thesis is that undergoing constraint and identifying what constrains are items of different kinds: resistance is an event, the attribution of its provenance is an inference — and no property of the event (intensity, cost, duration, unavailability, recalcitrance, personal form) yields that inference on its own. Taking the case of the Philadelphia Society of Friends between 1738 and 1776, the paper transports into this configuration the attribution procedures that operate in other domains, and shows that what crosses over is not what does the work: what is missing is a route of access independent of the very mediations whose provenance is in question. An accounting is then built which charges each rival identification with what it accommodates, what it predicts, what it must add, and what debt it contracts — applied with the same measure to naturalistic descriptions and to the tradition itself. The result is negative and determinate: in the material examined, no public procedure produced the required inequality between rival identifications. What remains is not scepticism but exposure: a public property, poorer than truth and for that reason usable, which distributes no winners and blocks the conversion of absent adjudication into victory for either side.

DIETRICH, Pablo. The Event and the Inference: Exposure, Debt, and the Limits of the Public Adjudication of Provenance. Zenodo, tradução do autor, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23818229.