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“I have proof” sounds like a window onto what happened. Derived from the foundation’s result that the Past is inaccessible and that present records make it look otherwise, a proof is a present mark read against other present marks: it settles the reader’s expectation and does not reach the event. … readWhat Is Proof
An ancestor is ordinarily described as someone you can trace, and the tracing is thought to run out where the documents do. Derived from the foundation, the word turns out to name somebody exactly as settled as your own mother and, for the overwhelming majority of them, permanently unreadable — and those are two separate facts, which is the distinction the family tree has no room for. … readWhat Is an Ancestor
A witness is supposed to be someone who was there: a person in relation to an event, receiving it and carrying it forward unaltered. The foundation says a witness is not in relation with the event at all, because the event is over and what is over cannot hold up its end of anything. A witness is what an act left behind in a living thing — a mark, not a window — and testimony is a present reading of that mark. That is why a camera counts, why you can become a witness six days after the fact, why two honest people on one corner carry two different crashes, and why nobody has performed an unwitnessed act. … readWhat Is a Witness
Everyone treats agreement as evidence and counts heads to get more of it. One settled past means there is exactly one thing two honest readings can align with, and it is not each other — which makes the head count the wrong quantity, independence the only one carrying anything, and the disagreement you are trying to end the more informative of the two events. … readWhat Is Agreement