Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Cognition — the mind as information processing — perception, memory, reasoning and cognitive strategies — as studied by cognitive science and philosophy of mind (group: philosophy).
8 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| TERM-027 | cultural attractor | A stable endpoint of repeated reconstruction, read as “a shared decoding convention rather than a preserved historical object” (A110 §20). Used from A82 to C6 (whose §8 heading has it); the word does not appear in the manuscript. | Active |
| TERM-055 | operational availability, of a resource for an action: the chance that an agent–environment system, given the cue it actually has, deploys the resource for the task before the deadline | A17 §3’s α, with A19’s cue added. Named because the exchange used it in five turns (A16 to A19, and A23 §II) under “available”, “accessible” and “deployable”. The term separates the deployability of a resource from its presence and from knowing it is present (CLAIM-296). | Active |
| TERM-073 v3 | interpretation, as a context-dependent determination of significance: a transformation that differentiates information and establishes or revises its consequences within an operative organization, defined without experience | The sense of “interpretation” in which CLAIM-412 is stated, from A7 and A11 of the exchange on experience and interpretation. An interpretation has three parts: a distinction, a context and a consequence. It is both the result and the operation, since applying it can change the state later interpretations act on, as TERM-026’s frame does. It is defined without experience, so unconscious perception, a classifier or a regulator interprets in this sense. That is the cost CLAIM-411 names. Adopted 2026-10-29, with significance kept apart from efficacy. | Active |
| TERM-079 | belief, of a process: a maintained, truth-directed inferential commitment, held to the degree that the process uses a proposition as a premise in interpreting observations, generating expectations and evaluating counterfactuals across the contexts it bears on, together with the profile by which that commitment is revised; distinct from entertaining an interpretation, from asserting it, and from granting it authority over action | Proposed in the exchange of 2026-10-24 (workbench entry of 2026-10-24, U25), after the owner asked: “we have an operational characterization of feeling, wanting, liking… how about belief?” The record had accounts of what governs action and what is felt, and nothing comparable for belief. The candidate puts belief on the same footing, tested by its role in anticipation, inference and revision, not by report or by which motive wins. Not adopted. | Proposed |
| TERM-082 v2 | consciousness, and which sense: phenomenal, access, self-consciousness or wakefulness | The owner’s, U12 of the exchange of 2026-10-26, quoting A11’s “None of these distinctions requires attributing consciousness, collective intention, or moral worth to the system”: “probably worth designing TERMs around these as well”. A12’s sense map, as a boundary: a claim about organization, access or self-modelling does not become a claim about experience by sharing a word with it. The senses are Block’s and the clinical one; the record reads Block in LIT-643. Proposed. | Proposed |
| 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 |
| TERM-098 v2 | concept, as realized by an organization: a reusable, systematically consequential pattern of distinctions, applicable across a stated range of contexts with inferential or operational consequences; distinct from the feature or representation that carries it, from the organization that realizes it, and from what it is about, and distinct from conceptual corrigibility, the further capacity to find and revise its inadequacies | Filed at the owner’s decision of 2026-10-31, after the exchange “Analyze nucleation concepts” defined “concept” three times in three turns (A4, A5, A6). At the owner’s review, version 2 separates conceptual organization, which the term names, from conceptual corrigibility, a further achievement it does not require. A candidate, not adopted: QUESTION-360 asks what would settle it. | Proposed |