Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Contestability
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms (2012)
Anyone subject to a decision must have a real route to challenge it — to inspect the grounds it was made on, to contest the outcome, and to have that challenge answered. Legitimacy is not settled once by an election or an act of consent; it is held open by that route staying available. The test of a free system is not that its rulers are kind, but that their decisions can be contested by the people they affect.
Analysis
Two of Pettit's three requirements get real machinery. The grounds are inspectable because the decision is laid out as named arguments and the links between them, and a challenge can be acted on because the gradient method computes which link weight must move, and by how much, for a chosen conclusion to reach a chosen strength. The third is missing entirely. There is no forum: the deciding system assesses the grounds offered against itself, nobody has standing to file anything, and the target strength is set by whoever runs the algorithm.
Non-domination
PartialNot claimedDefinition · Philip Pettit, Republicanism (1997)
Freedom here is not the absence of interference. You are unfree if someone holds unchecked power over you — even if they never misuse it and mean well. A benevolent master is still a master, and so is an authority whose workings you cannot see. Legitimacy requires that power be checked, not merely well-intentioned.
Analysis
Pettit's paradigm of domination is an authority whose workings you cannot see, and an argumentation framework meets that half of the objection by laying the grounds out in a form a person can interrogate. The check stops at visibility. The operator builds the framework, sets the weights, chooses the strength to aim for and decides whether the revision is applied, so the power that has been made visible is not thereby made answerable to anyone subject to it.
Public decision record
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Common-law practice
Rulings on challenges are written down, published and citable, so the system's interpretation of its own rules accumulates in the open, where it can be studied, invoked and criticized. The record is what makes the system predictable as well as legitimate: nothing is settled in private, and every decision leaves its reasoning behind it.
Analysis
Nothing is written down, published or made citable. Worse for the tradition, the mechanism erases as it works: a successful contestation moves the edge weights until the framework yields the desired strength, and what was contested, on what grounds, and what changed is preserved nowhere. Common law keeps the overruled case in the books so that the line of interpretation stays visible; here the earlier state of the framework is simply gone.