AIM Framework glossary
Referent Foreclosure
Canonical definition
The condition of a sincere prediction whose Referent was available and was eliminated by the action the prediction prompted. Where a prediction that an event will occur is acted upon by an intervention that prevents the event, the domain was world-constraining and the verdict was available, and the act of preventing is what removed the occasion on which the verdict would have been returned, so the prediction never collapses out of its superposed classification state. Referent Foreclosure is distinguished from the aesthetic regime, in which no Referent is constitutively available and nothing was removed, and from Referent Abandonment, in which the Referent has returned its verdict and the coupled regime declines to obey it. The non-arrival of the verdict under Foreclosure is the condition the action was taken to produce rather than a defect or a refusal. The Induced-Decoherence Test cannot be constructed on a foreclosed prediction, because that Test requires the predicted event to be permitted at small scale. Foreclosure is a property of the single prediction and not of its class: across many occasions the rate at which the predicted event occurs is world-constraining and decoheres although no member of the rate does.
Explanation
If you predict a disaster and then stop it, you never find out whether you were right. The world would have settled the question, and your own success is what removed the occasion on which it would have settled it. This is different from a question the world could never answer, and different from an answer the world gave that people refuse to accept. Here the answer was coming and the prevention is what cancelled it. The practical sting is that a warning that was correct and acted on, and a warning that was never needed, look exactly the same afterwards. Both leave nothing. The way out is to stop asking about the single case and count the rate across many.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Named Result.