AIM Framework glossary
Provenance Maintenance Principle
Canonical definition
Education is not completed at the end of schooling. A True Belief installed by teaching is held on the testimony that installed it and is exposed to Contactless Updating for as long as endogenous Evidence continues to arrive, so obeying the Referent requires the Belief to be maintained as a recurring task. Repetition of the verdict without its provenance is Evidence of the same class as the Evidence arriving against it and holds the Belief only on the balance of the social flow. What can take the Belief out of that contest is the Individual's own operation of the Provenance Rule, which requires the trace of the settling test to be kept available and the operation itself to be kept in use. The interval at which maintenance is owed is set by the rate of the flow against the Belief and shortens as Coupling Strength rises. The maintenance defends against Contactless Updating away from the Referent and not against the Mimetic Drive to False Belief, which declines the operation altogether; where both act on one Belief, both remedies are owed, and the Standing Test settles whether positional value is present.
Explanation
Finishing school does not finish your education. What you were taught is worn down for the rest of your life by what people around you say, and by your own replayed doubts, and hearing the answer again only helps as much as hearing a doubt hurts. What keeps a true Belief is going back, now and then, to how the question was settled, and using that to weigh the doubts as they come. The more connected and talkative your surroundings, the more often that is needed. None of this helps someone who would lose face by changing their mind; that is a different problem, and it needs a different answer.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle (normative).