ADR-060: A claim or account that bears on a question without answering it says bears_on, and answers is for an answer, held or offered

Context

ADR-049 says a question is Answered when Active entries answer it in full, and that one answered in part is split, so that a settled part becomes its own Answered question. The third status review found 37 Open questions with an Active entry in answered_by. It split 9 of them.

Readers then went through all 102 Active edges on the remaining 34. None settled a delimited part of its question. The reasons recur:

• A sufficient case for a which-question. THEORY-185’s independent attributes, against QUESTION-025’s correlated ones.
• One model where the question asks about all. THEORY-215’s Hawkes stability conditions, against QUESTION-091’s allocation-dependent kernels.
• A premise of the question. THEORY-758 and THEORY-745 on nested spectral subspaces, for QUESTION-217.

Several of the entries already said so in their own directives. THEORY-185 has “cited as what this result bears on”.

Decision

• bears_on (CLAIM or THEORY to QUESTION), with the converse bearing: evidence for or against a question, or a premise of it, that neither answers it nor settles a part of it exactly.
• answers: an answer to the question as posed, alone or with others. An Active entry holds the answer, and a Proposed one offers it. A part that is settled exactly is split off under ADR-049, and the answer links to the child.
• The 102 Active edges on Open questions are moved from answers to bears_on, each on both sides. The review that read them is the third status review’s workbench entry.

An offered part-answer. A Proposed entry that would, if held, settle a delimited part of a question keeps answers. It goes Active and is split off under ADR-049 then, and not before, because ADR-049 splits only what is settled. The fourth status review found 15 such edges among the 240 it read.

Alternatives considered

• A qualifier on answers, such as answers: {code, partial: true}. Every consumer would have to read two cases out of one relation, and the question page would still list the evidence under “Answered by”.
• Leave answers overloaded and acknowledge the rows. The check “Open with an Active answer” would then stay noise, which is how it came to list 37 questions with no debt behind most of them.

Consequences

• An Open question with an Active answers link is now real ADR-049 debt. The worklist’s section, and luria’s answered_but_open pattern once it is adopted, report only that.
• 240 edges from Proposed entries on 109 Open questions were not reviewed when this was decided. The fourth status review read them all and moved 168 to bears_on. Some are offered answers. Others, such as THEORY-201 on QUESTION-025 (“cited as partial evidence, not as settled”), are bearing and should move. A status review that meets one moves it.
• Question pages show evidence under “Bearing on it”, apart from the answers.