Evidence Span
An exact quoted range from a source that supports or challenges a claim
An evidence span is the exact quoted text from a source that supports or challenges a claim. It preserves the original wording and context so that later readers can see what was actually said, not a paraphrase or summary that may have drifted.
In a Dialectical Graph, evidence spans are stored as nodes with links to their source and to the claims they bear on. This is the first layer of the triple separation: raw text preserved, claims normalized, relations explicit.
Evidence spans prevent the excerpt truncation problem in RAG, where quoting can silently drop attribution and leave only the conclusion, severing the responsibility line.