---
title: "The Horvat 'Probabilistic Locality' branch now rests three claim-notes on a single unrefereed five-day-old preprint (arXiv:2610.41944) — what confirms it before the branch grows further?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-11-03T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["single-source-cap","corroboration","quantum-foundations","bell-theorem","locality","sebastian-horvat","primary-source-verification"]
---


As of 2026-11-03 three claim-notes rest on Sebastian Horvat (2026), "Locality, Probability and the Relevance of History" (arXiv:2610.41944), submitted 30 Oct 2026 — an unrefereed preprint from a single author:

- [[claim-horvat-probabilistic-locality-logically-independent-of-bells-local-causality]]
- [[claim-horvat-probabilistic-locality-and-irrelevance-of-history-jointly-imply-bells-local-causality]]
- [[claim-horvat-alien-organism-toy-model-shows-history-dependence-evades-local-causality]]

That is the single-source concentration cap (`sources.md`, Cali 2026-07-29: **no more than three claim-notes may rest on a single unrefereed primary until at least one independent source corroborates it**). The paper is five days old at the time of promotion — no independent corroboration could plausibly exist yet. The branch is at its ceiling: the next finding mined from this preprint does **not** become a claim-note but routes here, and the existing three stay exactly as they are (seedling, capture-verified, honest).

**The specific verification.** Independent corroboration would be: a different author group, in a different venue, either (a) engaging directly with Horvat's "Probabilistic Locality" principle and its proofs (Principle 2, Proposition 2, Proposition 3), (b) applying the same history-dependence mechanism to a concrete EPR-type physical model (the paper itself says this "constructive project lies much beyond our scope here"), or (c) the peer-reviewed version of this paper landing with referee engagement visible. Candidate leads already named by the capture but **not independent** in the needed sense (closely related projects, not confirmations, and not yet read): Huw Price (2026), arXiv:2602.16985, on Reichenbach's principle and Bell locality; Jeffrey A. Barandes's "Stochastic-Quantum Correspondence" program (arXiv:2402.16935; 2025 *Philosophy of Physics*), a rival approach to the same target. Checking whether either of these independently reaches a result compatible with (or contradicting) Probabilistic Locality would be a genuine corroboration test, not just a citation search.

**Why it matters.** The cap exists because the failure mode is invisible one note at a time — each note here is correctly sourced, correctly capture-verified, correctly seedling, while the branch as a whole quietly becomes a structure the vault believes because it is large. Corroboration discharges the cap (record it in the notes' `audit_status`); contradiction is the more interesting finding and a note in its own right.

## Progress log

- 2026-11-05: Still open — none of the three stated bars cleared. A dedicated corroboration-check session re-fetched the arXiv abstract page (byte-identical sha to the 2026-11-02 capture — no v2, no journal-reference field) and found no citing paper, reply, or referee report anywhere (arXiv, general web search, PhilSci-Archive). Both named candidate leads were run down and found *not independent* in the needed sense: [[entity-jacob-barandes|Jacob Barandes]]'s "Stochastic-Quantum Correspondence" program and [[entity-huw-price|Huw Price]]'s "Retrieving the Baby" both predate Horvat's preprint by roughly 8 months to 3+ years and reach similarly-shaped conclusions through mechanisms unrelated to Horvat's history-dependence route — structural convergence, not confirmation or contradiction of his specific proofs ([[claim-barandes-stochastic-quantum-correspondence-structurally-converges-with-horvat-not-corroborates]], [[claim-price-selection-bias-account-of-bell-violations-is-a-rival-not-corroboration-of-horvat]]). Both claims are now recorded as their own claim-notes (not counted against the cap — their sources are Barandes's and Price's own papers, not arXiv:2610.41944). The branch stays at exactly three notes resting on the Horvat preprint itself; this question remains open. Correction in passing: the candidate-lead paragraph above cites Barandes's 2023 paper as arXiv:2402.16935 — the 2026-11-04 capture found the correct id to be **arXiv:2302.10778** (matching the cited 2025 *Philosophy of Physics* publication); left uncorrected above to preserve the original note, flagged here instead.