
Six independent engineering traditions — IEEE 754 NaN, SQL NULL, tainttracking, abstract interpretation, imprecise probabilities, andprovenance semirings — have each solved a fragment of one problem: howto compute honestly over unverified data. This preprint shows that allsix implement fragments of a single logic generated by one principle:truth is never granted on credit. There are exactly two truth values(verdicts are always classical); the third symbol Z is a mark on anunverified input, not a truth value. For this logic (ZTL) the preprint builds: the measured price list ofclassical laws (12 survive, including modus ponens; 14 fall — all ofthem "truth from form"); the split between rules and laws with aone-directional deduction theorem for the primitive arrow; a signedtableau calculus with machine-proven soundness, completeness and cutadmissibility; an algebraic passport — expressive completeness of theexternal layer, a definable implication with the full deductiontheorem, Craig interpolation, and the Blok–Pigozzi conditions verifiedon the matrix (ZTL is algebraizable, yet not self-extensional);quantifiers over finite and arbitrary domains; modal and probabilisticidentifications; a theory of verification (a verdict is a pair "value + warranty",where the warranty is a two-grade ladder: sound — never lies;hereditary — never revoked) and of evidence combination (conflict is neverrenormalized); and a quarantine passport typing every refusal by itsgenesis — paradox, intrinsic, underdetermined, unverified input,inherited — with a measured stipulation theorem. The classicalparadoxes (the liar, Jourdain's carousel, Curry, Yablo, the crocodile,Russell) receive a uniform diagnosis: pointwise quarantine instead ofexplosion. The entire development — fourteen Lean 4 modules — is machine-checked withan EMPTY axiom list (no classical choice, no quotients, not evenpropositional extensionality; definitions included). Every numericalclaim is reproducible by the repository's regression (40 test stands);an interactive studio (natural language → the ZFL formal language →the measured core) ships with the repository. Functionally the {not, and, or} fragment coincides, cell by cell, withthe external layer of Bochvar's logic (1938) — a kinship found in theliterature search after the tables had been generated, not a source;the contribution is the generatingprinciple, an implicational floor outside the Rosser–Turquettestandardness conditions, the calculus, the machine verification, andthe bridges to the engineering traditions. What is new in v1.2 — first, the TEMPORAL LAYER. ZTL's only clock is thearrival of ground: one tick = one verification. The warranty ladder isread as a system of temporal quantifiers — until-verification = truenow, sound = true at every ending, hereditary = true always along everypath — with the absorption and arrow theorems machine-checkedstructurally (ZTime.lean, empty axiom list; every completedverification path ends hereditary). An expiry event returns earnedground to the mark and splits time into epochs — the knowledgechronology (learning about the same world) versus the validitychronology (the world changing) — and the EPOCH BOUNDARY THEOREM(EpochBoundary.lean, empty axiom list, structural for every formula ofthe language) states: a verdict invariant across unrestricted epochcrossing is constant — it reads none of its grounds; non-trivialguarantees require the boundary, which is thereby a logical necessity,not an administrative convenience. The layer is priced for use: earlysettlement (once hereditary, remaining checks buy nothing),expiry-insurance (a shortcut's savings are a loan against itsexpirable ground), the ungrounded verification event (the closed-worldloan "no proof of revocation, hence not revoked" cannot enter thelogic — an argument from absence never yields T — and is exposed inthe event ledger). And a price list of DERIVATIONS: forward chainingover the 12 alive rules shows they are transport, not creation — fromthe empty premise set nothing is derivable even with the fallen rulesas loans, ZTL's own guarded tautologies included; the classicalstep invisible from inside (double-negation elimination) becomes apriced borrowing with a named creditor. New sections 21-23; theZFL language gains a verification timeline played into chronicles;regression now 40 stands + Lean. Also new in v1.2: the central construction is named — thezero-trust lift (§2), with its disambiguation from the strict (Kleene)lift; §3.8, an explicit Lean-verified census of the sixteen lifted binaryconnectives that re-derives Finn's completeness landscape for theexternal-Bochvar class (Studia Logica 1974): solo-completeness tracksnon-commutative directionality — Sheffer's stroke and Peirce's arrowfall (both stall in one shared 18-table cage), both implications andboth abjunctions survive — with the kernel clone equalitiesmachine-checked on the empty axiom list (lean/ZClone.lean), thesurviving basis read as the credit detector; thefence-depth theorem (§19): the hereditary warranty is checkable atdepth exactly m−1 and no constant-depth fence exists (the guardfamily over the fallen law of identity); the warranty ladderstress-tested at scale (151.8M pairs, 0 violations); the three-lawscapstone (§3.1): of the classical triad only non-contradictionsurvives the lift — a denial is free, an affirmation is on credit;§11 opened by the paradox engine: paradox(f) = ground(S = f(S)), theexpeditions as the range of one construction, with the verifiedcontainment (ZTL-settled nets are a strict subset of the classicallycategorical ones; stand pengine.py); the honestBochvar ledger (§4): the {¬,∧,∨} coincidence found post hoc, not asource, now joined by the Łukasiewicz pedigree — the tables areBochvar's, the MEANING of the mark Z descends from Ł₃'s "possible /not yet determined" (ref [36]), and the genetic order of the alphabetreads N, Z, F, T: nothing → doubt → free denial → earned affirmation;and the passport's phase letter glossed (§10): read N asNot-yet — Kleene's undefined by intent housed as a phase — with errorstyped as interface events (the premature read of a phase; signalingNaN is the cousin), not as a logical letter. What was new in v1.1 (same-day self-correction): §19 is corrected —the verdict warranty is a two-grade ladder (sound / hereditary). Thev1.0 claim "stability-by-supervaluation ⟺ invariance underverifications" (90/90) was a fact about that section's 10-formulapool, not a law: it is falsified by the or(ladder, gap) cells, e.g.¬¬p ∨ (q∨¬q), found by the identity atoms of the operational-setsexpedition (E21) on a 3303-formula pool and cross-checked with thesection's own instruments. The sound half of the warranty survives(a sound verdict never lies); only hereditary invariance buys shelflife. The correction was found the day of v1.0's publication and isreleased after three further expeditions leaned on the correctedmachinery and it held. AI disclosure: this work was carried out with the substantialparticipation of the AI system Claude (Anthropic) in a dialoguesetting; all design decisions, fork choices, and final responsibilityrest with the human author. The reliability of the results does notdepend on trusting the AI: every claim is checkable by the repositorycode and the Lean 4 kernel.
The preprint text is CC BY 4.0; the accompanying repository code isMIT-licensed. The Lean corpus (10 modules) verifies with an emptyaxiom list; run `python3 run_all.py` for the full regression(30 stands + Lean build).
supervaluation, provenance semirings, paracomplete logic, paradoxes, epoch boundary, Russell's paradox, ZTL, IEEE NaN, theory of truth, signed tableaux, three-valued logic, Bochvar logic, temporal logic, warranty, Sheffer stroke, taint tracking, imprecise probabilities, abstract interpretation, Craig interpolation, machine-checked proofs, Leibniz's law, zero trust, SQL NULL, unverified data, Hilbert epsilon, Lean 4, institutional computation, cut admissibility, Suszko's thesis, algebraizable logics, runtime verification, Blok–Pigozzi, Kripke fixed points
supervaluation, provenance semirings, paracomplete logic, paradoxes, epoch boundary, Russell's paradox, ZTL, IEEE NaN, theory of truth, signed tableaux, three-valued logic, Bochvar logic, temporal logic, warranty, Sheffer stroke, taint tracking, imprecise probabilities, abstract interpretation, Craig interpolation, machine-checked proofs, Leibniz's law, zero trust, SQL NULL, unverified data, Hilbert epsilon, Lean 4, institutional computation, cut admissibility, Suszko's thesis, algebraizable logics, runtime verification, Blok–Pigozzi, Kripke fixed points
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