Temporal Governor — past / present / future, honestly

A short note on temporal_governor.py. The request was for a "past-present-future infra." Unlike some earlier phrasings, this one has a real, buildable core — but not the metaphysical one. It does not model the flow of time, take a side on presentism vs the block universe, or claim a moving "now." It governs the one temporal boundary with usable content: the epistemic one.

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Why this is the buildable version

The physics of time offers several boundaries — the light cone (causal), the arrow (thermodynamic), the present (frame-relative, arguably not objective). None of those is something a deterministic tool should pretend to operate. But there is one temporal boundary that is sharp, uncontested, and actionable, because it is a fact about your information, not about time itself:

• the past is recorded and verifiable — where a record survives;
• the present is the acting boundary — you observe or decide now, and cannot re-check it later;
• the future is not yet real — it can be forecast, never verified.

That is the reachability-of-truth spectrum (see the essay of that name) laid along the time axis, and it is exactly what this governor enforces.

What it does

govern(claim) assigns a claim its honest verifiability by tense:

Tense	Condition	Verdict	Meaning
Past	a surviving record exists	VERIFIABLE	check it against the record
Past	no record	UNRECORDED	not verifiable now, and not true-by-default — treat as testimony
Present	—	ACT_BOUNDARY	observe or decide now; route decisions through the timing/decision layer
Future	forecast (optional probability)	FORECAST	UNVERIFIED until it arrives; usable as a probability, never assertable as fact
Future	asserts certainty / "verified"	UNVERIFIABLE_NOW	refused — a category error, downgraded to a forecast

Two structural refusals carry the weight. A claim that the future is verified/certain is refused (certify_future always raises) — the future has not happened, so it cannot be a fact, only a probability. And a claim that the past is known without a record is held at UNRECORDED with the overclaiming name flagged — the past is verifiable only where a record survives, never true-by-default. Both reuse the toolkit's overclaim linter unchanged.

The single error it prevents

Everything above serves one purpose: stop a forecast from being treated as a fact, and stop an unrecorded past from being treated as known. Those two are among the most common and most costly epistemic errors in planning, risk, and decision-making — a projection quoted as a certainty, a memory or an undocumented event asserted as established. The governor makes the tense-to-verifiability mapping explicit and fail-closed, so the error has to be committed deliberately rather than by default.

Honest limits

• It governs verifiability, not truth. A VERIFIABLE past claim can still be false (check the record); a FORECAST can be well- or badly-calibrated. It assigns the epistemic regime, not the answer.
• "Has a record" is a declared input. Whether a real, independent record exists is the caller's attestation; the governor does not go find the record, it enforces what follows once you say whether one exists.
• No metaphysics. It says nothing about whether the future "exists," whether time flows, or where the present objectively is. It operates only on the information asymmetry between recorded and unwritten — which is the part that is not contested.
• Same scope as the family. A non-safety-critical governance aid (no DO-178C / IEC 61508 / Class 1E assurance), stdlib-only, deterministic, self-testing; not a control-path element.