Terminus
Where a chain of justification stops: an axiom, a brute fact, a circle, or a regress. Debby treats the stop as a topology label, not an automatic win or crash. Calling a stop “virtuous” still owes a non-question-begging test — especially a parity-breaker against a rival circle of the same shape.
A terminus is where justification stops. Agrippa's trilemma says the stop is an axiom, a circle, or a regress. Debby's glossary already scores those. The Atlas entry exists because this corpus found that locating a stop is not a verdict.
OTC-014 treats the trilemma as a topology label. OTC-009 asks what would make a worldview-level circle virtuous rather than vicious, and adopts four conditions: explanatory gain, independent constraint, parity-breaking, and scope-appropriate humility. Both Dyer's revelational circle and Sher's holistic circle currently fail condition 3 — a shared cost, not an Orthodox-specific crash. Calling your stop "axiomatic" or the rival's "brute" is a label until the test is run.
The mistaken everyday reading is "the end of the argument, so we won" or, equally, "every stop is a failure." Neither is Debby's rule.
Where this comes up
Sources
- Debby research packets OTC-009 (virtuous vs vicious circularity) and OTC-014 (Agrippa as diagnostic)