Document Collision

Document collision is the protocol of forcing disparate sources to engage with each other's claims rather than merely summarizing them in parallel. When documents collide, contradictions become visible, definitions must be aligned, and contention is surfaced as an explicit object.

This is the opposite of the "balanced summary" approach, which smooths over disagreement. Collision says: "These two sources say incompatible things. What specifically conflicts? Under what conditions? What would resolve it?"

In Coscientist, document collision is implemented through the Dialectical Graph: claims are extracted, normalized, and linked by attack, undercut, and support relations. The result is a map of where sources agree, where they conflict, and what remains open.