Contention

Contention is a structured conflict between claims, definitions, or methods. It is an explicit object representing "these cannot all be true at once" under shared conditions. Treating contention as first-class matters because it turns disagreement into something you can map: what conflicts with what, why, and under which assumptions.

In a Dialectical Graph, contention supports synthesis that conditions claims rather than averaging them. This is a key limitation of standard RAG, which tends to blur conflicts because it lacks explicit argumentative relations.