Self-Sealing Interpretation Through Confirmation Rules: How an Interpretation Can Count Every Response as Support

This conceptual paper introduces Self-Sealing Interpretation Through Confirmation Rules, a mechanism in which an interpretation’s updating rule treats every admissible response as confirmation. Admission, denial, silence, and negative findings can each become support, leaving no response processed by the unchanged rule able to count against the interpretation. The paper evaluates claimed support by asking whether alternatives remain open and stable enough to compare, revisions are explicit, and competing accounts lead to different expectations. A self-sealing interpretation may be correct. Further evidence can help when it changes the alternatives or the rule; a single denial treated as evasion does not establish the mechanism. The discussion connects the mechanism to Popper’s critique of theories immune to contradiction and examines Friedrich Spee’s 1631 account of witch-trial procedures in Cautio Criminalis. His account describes opposing responses being counted as proof of the same charge. The source is a critic’s procedural summary, and the paper does not generalize it to every tribunal. Part of the Definitions and Evidence series within On Human Modeling, the paper examines who can admit disconfirmation and revise interpretive rules. Its framework can inform human–AI research on whether user corrections and contrary evidence can change a system’s interpretation, including how revisions to its alternatives and updating rules are made explicit.