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.
Recorded dissent
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Appellate practice
When judges disagree, the losing view is not erased — it is published alongside the majority's, signed and reasoned. That does two things at once: it forces the majority to answer a stated objection, which is what makes the majority's own reasoning legible, and it keeps the rejected theory on the shelf, available to become tomorrow's majority.
Analysis
The minority judgment genuinely survives, attributed to the individual who gave it and modelled rather than averaged away, which is the half of the concept about keeping the rejected view on the shelf. What is missing is the reasoned, signed opinion. A differing label carries no argument, so the majority is never made to answer a stated objection and nothing is available to be taken up later as a better theory. Dissent here is a count, not a case.
Overruling with provenance
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Common-law practice
The law can reverse itself when a precedent has become unworkable, unjust or simply overtaken by events — but only in the open: the overruling decision names what it overturns and why, so the change has a traceable history instead of being quietly written out of the record.
Analysis
No rating is ever revisited and nothing names an earlier judgment it overturns. The nearest thing is the LeWiDi series revising its own evaluation openly across editions, moving beyond cross-entropy to new metrics in the third round, but that changes how systems are graded rather than any holding about a case. Diverging Preferences does alter what counts as usable disagreement, and says so plainly, yet it acts at the point of evaluation and training instead of reversing anything on the record.
Incompletely theorized agreement
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Cass R. Sunstein, Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict (1996)
Agreeing on what to do in the case at hand while explicitly leaving the deeper principle unresolved. The agreement can be on an outcome, a rule or a mid-level principle; what gets bracketed is the comprehensive worldview underneath. Courts do this constantly: it lets people who disagree about theory still act together, one case at a time.
Analysis
Nothing here produces an agreed outcome, so there is no case settled while the principle underneath is left open; the output is a distribution or a per-annotator prediction. The taxonomy in Diverging Preferences does sort disagreement into ten categories across four classes and finds most of it comes from task underspecification or response style, which is the sort of diagnostic Sunstein's move needs, but it is put to the opposite use. Divergence is located in order to reduce its influence rather than bracketed so that the case can be decided anyway.