Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it over, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that the approach claims but does not carry over is a shortfall. A concept that it neither claims nor carries over is an omission, which marks a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work.
Recorded dissent
PartialShortfall · partially preservedDefinition (Appellate practice)
When judges disagree, the losing view is not erased. It is published alongside the majority's, signed and reasoned. This has two effects. It forces the majority to answer a stated objection, which makes the majority's own reasoning legible. It also keeps the rejected theory on record, so that it remains available to become the majority view later.
Analysis
The minority judgment survives. It is attributed to the individual who gave it and modeled rather than averaged away. This is the part of the concept about keeping the rejected view available for later. What is missing is the reasoned, signed opinion. A differing label carries no argument, so the majority never has to answer a stated objection, and nothing is available to be taken up later as a better theory. Dissent is thus recorded as a count of labels rather than as a reasoned case.
Overruling with provenance
AbsentOmissionDefinition (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. The change therefore has a traceable history instead of being quietly removed from the record.
Analysis
No rating is ever revisited, and nothing names an earlier judgment that it overturns. The closest example is the LeWiDi series, which openly revises its own evaluation across editions and moved beyond cross-entropy to new metrics in the third round. However, this changes how systems are graded rather than any holding about a case. Diverging Preferences does change 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
AbsentOmissionDefinition (Cass R. Sunstein, Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict, 1996)
This is agreement on what to do in the case at hand, while the deeper principle is explicitly left unresolved. The agreement can be on an outcome, a rule, or a mid-level principle, and the comprehensive worldview underneath is set aside. Courts do this constantly, because it lets people who disagree about theory still act together, one case at a time.
Analysis
Nothing here produces an agreed outcome, so no case is settled while the principle underneath is left open. The output is a distribution or a per-annotator prediction. The taxonomy in Diverging Preferences sorts disagreement into ten categories across four classes, and finds that most of it comes from task underspecification or response style. This is the kind of diagnostic that Sunstein's strategy needs, but it is put to the opposite use. Divergence is located in order to reduce its influence, rather than set aside so that the case can be decided anyway.