The Brooks/Dreyfus and David-Brachet/catastrophic-forgetting bridges share a method but not a mechanism — one silence is a documented redaction, the other is (so far) undocumented non-contact

argument-from-silencenegative-citationbrooksdreyfuscatastrophic-forgettingorganizational-forgettingcross-domain-bridgebridge-noteepistemics

Two of the vault's cross-domain bridge-checks land in the same middle category: real shared method, no shared story. observation-puckette-dataflow-claims-confirmed-bridge-not-false-friend sets the confirmed-bridge standard — two claim-notes that turn out to be premise and conclusion of one author's one argument in one document. observation-hawks-jeffress-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend sets the opposite pole — shared rhetorical surface with no shared referent at any level. The Brooks/Dreyfus and David-Brachet/catastrophic-forgetting silences sit between the two.

Both are negative-citation findings reached by exhaustive enumeration, testing whether a cross-field name-echo hides real lineage, and both found zero. But the histories behind the two silences differ once checked. claim-brooks-1986-memo-cites-dreyfus-as-rebuttal-target and claim-brooks-dropped-dreyfus-citation-after-reviewer-criticism document that Brooks's 1991 silence on Dreyfus is a redaction with a paper trail: his 1986 predecessor memo named Dreyfus twice as the position it argued against, a reviewer objected ("The only philosopher cited is Dreyfus--but many of the issues raised have been treated more intelligibly by others"), and the published 1991 text carries no Dreyfus citation. The objection and the revision timeline are on Brooks's own account of his own peer review; the drop itself is established by comparing the memo against the published text — Brooks's blog does not narrate removing the citation, and his own gloss on the revision is that he "kept in all the things that the reviewer did not like." The redaction is documented; its motive is not. claim-catastrophic-and-organizational-forgetting-share-no-citation-lineage has found no equivalent mechanism on the forgetting side — no draft, memo, or earlier version in which either tradition cited the other and later dropped it; the evidence so far describes two fields that were never in documented contact, not a contact later edited away.

That asymmetry is why this bridge does not rise to the Puckette standard: the two silences are not evidence of the same underlying process — one is a specific, dated edit, the other is (on current evidence) non-contact from the start. It is also not a clean Hawks/Jeffress false friend, because a real method — exhaustive citation-graph enumeration testing a name-echo — genuinely underlies both. The bridge holds at the level of technique, not at the level of what happened.