FPF Reference

A.6.B:5.3 — Quadrant D: Deontics & Commitments

Preface node heading:a-6-b-5-3-quadrant-d-deontics-commitments:7137

Content

Intent. State governance: obligations, permissions, prohibitions, commitments, publication duties, operational duties, contractual commitments—always with accountable agents/roles.

Adjudication. In‑description (governance is stated in the spec); compliance may be audited via E-*.

Canonical form. A deontic statement MUST have an accountable subject (agent/role), e.g.:

  • “Client implementers MUST satisfy A-….”
  • “Operators SHALL retain carriers …”
  • “Provider SHALL meet E-… under exclusions …”

Canonical payload (recommended; lintable). When a D-* claim is intended to be lintable/reusable, it SHOULD be representable as a U.Commitment record (A.2.8). Default fields to make explicit:

  • id (often the D-* claim ID),
  • subject (accountable role/party; never an episteme),
  • modality (BCP‑14/RFC keyword family normalized),
  • scope + validityWindow,
  • referents (by ID; e.g., SVC-*, L-*, A-*, E-*, MethodDescriptionRef(...)),
  • optional adjudication.evidenceRefs when the commitment is meant to be auditable,
  • optional source when authority/provenance matters.

Prohibitions.

  • A D-* statement MUST NOT use “the system/service/interface/spec” as the grammatical subject unless the accountable role/party is explicitly named (so the statement is representable as a U.Commitment with an explicit subject, A.2.8). (F.18 is a lexical anchor only.)
  • A D-* statement MUST NOT restate L-* or A-* predicates in new words when an ID exists; it SHOULD reference the ID.
  • A D-* statement MUST NOT pretend that commitments are laws. A commitment is an agent relation, not a truth‑conditional invariant.

A.7 anchoring. D-* claims are primarily about Objects (roles/agents and their duties) or about Carriers (retention/exposure duties), but they are still written as Descriptions.

Required references (explicit).

  • If a D-* statement imposes compliance with a gate, it MUST reference the relevant A-* ID(s).
  • If a D-* statement is meant to be auditable, it SHOULD reference the E-* claim(s) that provide evidence and the carrier classes involved.