Standing-Layer Honest Public Standing Dynamics for Research Claims under Observable-Only, No-Meta Governance

This paper develops a first-principles theory of honest public standing dynamics for research claims under observable-only, no-meta governance. The setting is motivated by autonomous research systems that can generate hypotheses, code, experiments, analyses, and manuscripts faster than public verification pipelines can absorb them. Rather than modeling latent truth or consensus directly, the paper studies the standing law of a long-running public claim ecology once a constitutional public interface, an ordered public event prefix, and a replayable exploratory frontier have already been declared. The framework separates four layers: constitutional interface, transport, exploration, and standing. Within this architecture, the paper analyzes how publicly represented claims can move among standing states such as proposed, frontier, active, contested, stale, superseded, retired, and ready, using only declared public distinctions together with explicit service, reserve, frontier, and retained-memory constraints. The theory establishes boundary results showing that declared standing cannot in general recover unrestricted truth from indistinguishable public standing-input histories. It then proves architectural necessity results for later exoneration, including explicit public challengeability, reversible nonactive roles, and nonabsorbing retirement. A central contribution is a restoration-memory representation theory: retained memory is sufficient for local restoration exactly when the declared local restoration interface factors through it, yielding a canonical and minimal restoration quotient in the discrete main setting. The paper also introduces a constructive replayable policy class with typed blocking challenges, class-wise discharge, lineage-unit restoration summaries, scheduler-visible reactivation requests, reserve-aware admission and restoration, replayable frontier taxonomies, closed public randomness, and explicit hot-memory feasibility. From this policy class, it derives verification, boundedness, recurrent re-entry, threshold, drift, overload, and exploration-slack laws. The paper is intentionally narrow. It does not derive the constitutional interface, solve Byzantine agreement, prove scientific truth discovery, or optimize policy. Its contribution is to identify what a publicly replayable standing-layer institution can and cannot do when cumulative governance of research claims must remain observable-only, no-meta, challengeable, revisable, and compatible with finite public service and finite retained memory.