This paper develops a certificate-based comparison theory for a deliberately narrow but practically important target: changes in which designated legacy sentences are preferred when actual and baseline inquiries differ only in the disclosed records available on a fixed finite comparison frame. The framework does not claim that absence alone generates arbitrary labels, arbitrary languages, or unrestricted ontology invention. Instead, it fixes a finite anchor universe, a finite family of legacy labels, common extraction and licensing rules, and an explicit admissibility preorder on baselines, and asks when record absence changes which legacy claims are rationally retained, omitted, or later deleted. The formal theory has two layers. The exact layer assumes a fiberwise block-separability certificate under which feasible ontologies factor by realized boundary state, global score decomposes into block and outside terms, and global preference can be recovered from fiberwise maximization. The operational layer weakens exact additivity to bounded residual coupling: if local margins exceed a conservative coupling budget by more than 2epsilon, local dominance still lifts to global preference conclusions. In this way, the paper derives conditional global comparison theorems from audited local certificates rather than proposing an unrestricted discovery theorem for absence. To make these results interpretable and auditable, the framework imposes several additional controls. Baseline claims are always stated relative to an explicit admissibility preorder. Theorem-level support must be observer-admissible and protocol-visible, including bundle weights, corroboration and redundancy coefficients, and the tie-breaking rule that determines the canonical grounded support family. Baseline multiplicity is handled through finite theorem-relevant local-comparison signatures, while temporal robustness is transferred only through explicit stable-window finite-state quotient regimes. Corrective disclosure is restricted to record-grounded updates induced by newly disclosed records, and closure asymmetry is analyzed through exposure-decomposed local-gap certificates with a common backbone term and observer-specific exposure differentials. On this basis, the paper proves exact and approximate absence-pattern theorems, a tenure-driven eventual-erasure theorem, exact and approximate record-grounded corrective-disclosure theorems, and exact and approximate closure-exposure asymmetry theorems. A fully audited finite worked instance, a boundary-fiber certificate variant, and an operational certification protocol with a finite machine-readable manifest connect the formal results to deployable provenance-sensitive, archival, access-governed, and retrieval-mediated settings. Overall, the paper offers a disciplined sufficient-condition theory of preference reorganization under record absence on a fixed frame, together with an auditable route from exact formal statements to operational certification.
K Takahashi (Sat,) studied this question.