Traceability
The ability to follow a claim back to its sources and grounds
Traceability is the ability to walk a claim backward through its supporting structure: from conclusion to premises, from premises to evidence, from evidence to sources, and from sources to the methods and contexts that produced them. It is provenance made actionable.
When traceability breaks, errors become expensive to correct. You may know something is wrong without knowing why, and fixing it requires re-deriving rather than adjusting. This is why traceability is a core commitment of the epistemic protocol layer and why the Dialectical Graph stores explicit relations instead of leaving attribution implied by prose.
Traceability also enables knowledge synthesis: you can only align incompatible sources if you can see the path each one took to its conclusion.