Attribution Check¶
Checklist — instantiates Function-Without-Intent Caution
Prompts decision makers to separate current effect, original cause, actor intent, foreseeable harm, maintenance choices, and accountability claim.
Attribution Check is a per-case checklist that forces a single collapsed sentence — "this thing does harm, so they're to blame for meaning it" — apart into the six distinct claims it has fused: the current effect, the original cause, the actor intent, the foreseeable harm, the maintenance choices, and the accountability claim. Its defining move is drawing the full attribution boundary explicitly: it walks a decision-maker down a fixed list of separated questions, refusing to let an answer to one silently answer another, and then it produces a re-scoped restatement in which each claim carries only the confidence its own evidence supports. It is deliberately lightweight and repeatable — a discipline you run on a case, not a standing rubric of evidence bars.
Example¶
A factory upstream of a town's river is found to be discharging runoff that is killing fish, and the town's first draft of the story is a single accusation: "they poisoned our river on purpose." An environmental review board runs an Attribution Check before it acts. Line by line it separates the claims. Current effect: fish kills, confirmed. Original cause: the discharge is a byproduct of a process installed when the plant was built, permitted at the time. Actor intent: no evidence the harm was a goal. Foreseeable harm: strong — the toxicity was flagged in an industry bulletin years ago. Maintenance choices: the plant continued discharging for two seasons after an internal test confirmed the problem. Accountability claim: high on knowing maintenance and foreseeability, low on original malicious design. The explanation update rewrites the town's sentence into six scoped ones, and that restatement changes the remedy: not a fraud prosecution premised on intent, but a negligence-and-abatement action premised on foreseeable harm the company chose not to stop.
How it works¶
- Run the six lines in order. Effect → original cause → intent → foreseeable harm → maintenance choices → accountability, answering each on its own evidence.
- Quarantine the answers. Explicitly forbid an answer to one line from being borrowed to fill another ("harmful, therefore intended" is the banned move).
- Grade confidence per line. Mark each claim strong / weak / unknown rather than letting the whole case ride on one verdict.
- Emit the scoped restatement. Rewrite the original collapsed sentence as six claims, each hedged to its evidence — the checklist's deliverable.
Tuning parameters¶
- Line set — which claims the checklist enforces (the default six, or a domain-tuned variant). More lines catch finer conflations but slow the check.
- Confidence scale — binary flag versus graded strong/weak/unknown. Graded is more honest; binary is faster for low-stakes cases.
- Stakes gate — how heavy a case must be before the full checklist runs versus a two-line sanity pass. Matches effort to consequence.
- Restatement strictness — how aggressively the update hedges. Tighter prevents overreach; too tight produces mush no decision can act on.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is speed and portability: it stops the most common collapse — inferring intent from effect — in minutes, and it makes the maintenance and foreseeability lines visible so that "no original intent" cannot end the conversation. It operationalizes the law's separation of the guilty act from the guilty mind.[n1] Its failure mode is that a checklist only prompts the questions; it does not supply the evidence, so it can produce a tidy six-line restatement that is confidently wrong on every line if the inputs are bad. The classic misuse is running it to manufacture charitable doubt — hiding knowing harm behind "we separated the claims and intent is unproven." The guarding discipline is to feed each line real evidence (from Intent Audit or a genealogy) and to check claims against fixed bars rather than gut feel — which is what it consumes Evidence Threshold Table for.
How it implements the components¶
attribution_boundary— its core function: it draws the explicit boundary between effect, cause, intent, foreseeability, maintenance, and accountability, one line at a time.explanation_update— its deliverable: a re-scoped restatement of the original collapsed claim, each part hedged to its own evidence.
It does NOT pre-define, per claim-word, how much evidence each attribution requires (intent_evidence_check thresholds) — that's Evidence Threshold Table; Attribution Check separates the claims for one case, while the table sets the standing bars it checks them against.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Function-Without-Intent Caution — Attribution Check is the lightweight per-case separator of the archetype's fused claims.
- Consumes: Evidence Threshold Table — supplies the evidence bars each separated claim is graded against.
- Sibling mechanisms: Functional Analysis · Intent Audit · Institutional Genealogy · Design History Review · Root-Cause Explanation Review · Current Use Mapping · Evidence Threshold Table
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Assessment, Review & Assurance
Rationale: Prompts decision makers to separate current effect, original cause, actor intent, foreseeable harm, maintenance choices, and accountability claim, making its operative form a bounded evaluation of existing evidence or work that produces a finding or disposition.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Attribution Check as 'Prompts decision makers to separate current effect, original cause, actor intent, foreseeable harm, maintenance choices, and accountability claim', so its operative form is Assessment, Review & Assurance.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; high confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Law & Governance
Origin pattern: Cross-disciplinary synthesis
Present-day reach: Multi-domain
Rationale: Legal responsibility analysis explicitly separates act, mental state, actual causation, proximate causation, foreseeability, and liability.
Related originating lineages:
- Philosophy — Causal and moral-responsibility analysis separates contribution, intention, knowledge, and blame.
- Psychology — Attribution research explains systematic errors when observers infer causes and intentions from outcomes.
- Sociology & Anthropology — Institutional and cultural norms shape which actors are treated as responsible and which causes are visible.
Review resolution: Cornell's Legal Information Institute identifies act, mens rea, and causation as distinct criminal-law elements and explains foreseeability as a test for proximate responsibility. Those distinctions closely match the page's effect-cause-intent-foreseeability-accountability sequence, making law and governance primary while philosophy, psychology, and sociology remain formative.
Attribution caveat: Psychology explains attribution error, but the checklist's decisive distinctions govern responsibility and remedy in legal analysis.
Encyclopedia synthesis: The exact catalogued form synthesizes established practice rather than reproducing a single standard historical label.
Review outcome: Researched adjudication after independent review; high confidence.
Sources consulted:
- Legal Information Institute — Criminal Law: Elements of a Crime
- Legal Information Institute — Proximate Cause
Notes¶
[n1] Mens rea ("guilty mind") is the legal requirement that, for many offenses, a wrongful act (actus reus) be accompanied by a culpable mental state. The doctrine is a formal insistence that harmful effect and culpable intent are separate elements — the exact separation this checklist enforces. ↩