Lines of inquiry — A named line of the record’s own argument, so that a line can be set aside as a whole and what depends on it can be found. Retracting a line is a status change on its members, never a deletion (ADR-032).
Nucleating an argument — how an argument developed across stateless sessions settles into stable, addressable structure, and what a project memory contributes — the record itself as the case.
7 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| TERM-052 | crystallized argument | The owner’s term: the argument in its terminal state at a given point in a discussion, as matured as it has yet become. “Crystallization” is that maturing. Asking for the crystallized argument asks for a readout of the current terminal state, not for a new act of formation. | Active |
| TERM-056 | question drift: a provisional answer becoming part of the question an inquiry is pursuing, as distinct from query drift, in which the queries move away from a question that stays fixed | A21 §3’s distinction, used again at A23 VI.C. Classical retrieval names query drift (LIT-1079). An agent that rewrites its own task can drift in the question. The nucleating-argument line studies drift in concepts (CLAIM-177); this is drift in what is being asked. | Active |
| TERM-087 v3 | cut, and which sense: a Cartesian cut, Pattee’s epistemic cut, or Barad’s agential cut, enacted by an apparatus | Three senses of “cut” the exchange of 2026-10-27 used, which A9 §4 said “are not interchangeable concepts”. The Cartesian cut is a separation of observer from observed taken as given before any measurement. Pattee’s epistemic cut (LIT-1190, read in NOTE-952) is the functional separation of symbolic description from the dynamics it measures or controls, and is epistemic, not ontological. Barad’s agential cut (read first-hand only in her 2012 essay, LIT-1869; LIT-1653 and LIT-1657 unavailable) is a differentiation enacted within a phenomenon by an apparatus, through which boundaries and properties become determinate. Proposed: the record had no word for them, and they recur in CLAIM-476. | Proposed |
| TERM-089 v2 | apparatus, in the operational sense: a realized organization that selectively couples differences in one system to distinguishable outcomes in another; by function it may differentiate, retain, enforce and revise, and the four come apart | The sense of “apparatus” the exchange of 2026-10-27 converged on from U19 to U23, stated so that no observer and no constitutive metaphysics is presupposed. An apparatus makes some differences in a system produce distinct outcomes in another (differentiation), and may keep them (retention), let them change what happens next (enforcement), and change its own criteria of discrimination (revision). Proposed: the record uses “apparatus” in CLAIM-476 and TERM-087 in Barad’s sense, and needed a weaker one that a thermometer, a bacterium, a sensor network and luria all fall under without argument. | Active |
| TERM-091 v2 | relational vocabulary, of a class of descriptions: the arities and kinds of relation it can state (pairwise or higher-order, among states or among histories, of which declared types), and so which constraints are expressible in it at all | What QUESTION-283 asks about: whether composition can force a description to adopt relations its parts never needed. A sheaf on a graph has a pairwise vocabulary. Eliminating an interior can leave a constraint outside it (THEORY-1090). A luria record’s relational vocabulary is its declared relation types and fields, and amendments that add one (ADR-043, ADR-044) enlarge it. The term lets the record say that a constraint is inexpressible in a vocabulary, which is different from saying that it is false or unknown. Adopted 2026-10-29. | Active |
| TERM-092 v3 | inquiry frontier, of an agent at a budget: the questions it can formulate, making them determinate enough to pursue, with the concepts, records, tools, time and computation it actually has; distinct from the questions its language can express, from those it can pursue to a stated standard, and from those that have answers | The object of CLAIM-475, from A17 §§2 and 7 of the exchange of 2026-10-27. A question is on an agent’s frontier if some procedure available to it, within its budget and horizon, makes the question determinate enough to pursue. Formulating counts against the budget as well as answering. The frontier moves when resources grow and when reusable specifications make formulation cheaper, and it can change shape as well as size. The term separates askable from expressible and from answerable, which CLAIM-474’s last failure turns on. | Active |
| TERM-095 v2 | inquiry: a process that pursues a question, written (Σ, A, 𝓘, 𝓞, 𝓚, 𝓑): a language in which it is posed, an answer space that says which differences would count as an answer, the interventions and observations that make those differences accessible, criteria for judging candidate answers, and the resources it runs on; it is reflexive when any of these becomes what it is pursuing | The owner, 2026-10-27: inquiry is “an important building block of our formal argument”, and the record had no TERM for it. CLAIM-470 is stated in it, TERM-092’s inquiry frontier and TERM-088’s descriptive individuation presuppose it, and TERM-056’s question drift is a change inside one. The definition is A15 and A16’s tuple from the exchange of 2026-10-27, which neither called standard: answer space, admissible interventions, observations and criteria, with the language and the resource bounds A16 added. It is a construct, not a thesis. That inquiry is a form of specification is CLAIM-470’s claim, stated in this term and not built into it. Proposed. | Active |