Terminology and Prior-Art Boundary: Why Recursive Contamination Is Distinct

Recursive symbolic systems may reuse their own generated states as inputs, working estimates, memories, and eventually governing references. This note defines recursive contamination as an unauthorized promotion of a bounded or unresolved candidate into referential authority for later steps. It distinguishes the proposed failure mechanism from model collapse, sequential rollout error, retrieval or memory poisoning, and classical truth- maintenance methods. A deterministic reconstruction of 120 synthetic multi-hop cases illustrates reference-frame lockout and other promotion failures. Removing the promotion lock yields 15 unsafe commitments and 20 false halts; a provenance-only configuration yields 50 unsafe commitments. Crucially, an equivalently equipped conventional root- anchored joint verifier matches RSI exactly. These tests support a precise engineering distinction and a reproducible failure example, not a demonstrated claim of theoretical priority or unique empirical superiority. (Keywords. Recursive Symbolic Intelligence; recursive contamination; reference promotion; epistemic drift; provenance; truth maintenance; synthetic verification.)