THE RECURRENCE-TRANSFER FIDELITY THEORY (RTFT): A Context-Conditioned Mathematical Framework for Measuring Repeated-Outcome Fidelity, Functional Effectiveness, and Cross-Context Applicability

Repeated application is often evaluated through a single success percentage. That percentage, however, does not by itself establish whether outcomes are close to a target, stable across repeated trials, effective relative to a baseline, or transferable to new contexts. It also does not disclose the uncertainty of the estimate, the consequences of failure, or the conditions under which a claim ceases to hold.This paper proposes the Recurrence-Transfer Fidelity Theory (RTFT), a context-conditioned framework for operationalizing and evaluating the repeated application of a method, lesson, rule, policy, or claim. Its primary illustrative case is the Cross-Context Lesson-Reapplication and Outcome- Recurrence Case (CLORC), in which an acquired lesson is repeatedly applied in comparable and changing situations.The proposed architecture separates target fidelity, recurrence consistency, baseline-adjusted effectiveness, and cross-context transfer fidelity. It further specifies context mapping, operationalization, uncertainty assessment, divergence diagnosis, decision thresholds, falsification, and cumulative evidence governance.A bounded target-loss construction and a pairwise consistency measure are formalized, while binary success rates, confidence intervals, and sample-size planning are treated as domain-appropriate special cases. An optional composite score is defined only when component measures have been properly normalized and their weights justified in advance.RTFT does not assign one universal percentage to scientific validity or practical success. Rather, it proposes a reusable analytical architecture in which acceptance thresholds are set by the intended claim, available evidence, measurement properties, contextual scope, and consequences of error. The framework remains a proposal requiring further theoretical and empirical validation.Keywords: recurrence; fidelity; consistency; reproducibility; replicability; transferability; context; uncertainty; divergence; effectiveness; operationalization; mathematical framework.