nucleation

CLAIM-298: A frame can change a judgement by changing which of an interpreter's stored distinctions are reachable, without supplying any evidence about what is being judged

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Properties10
StatusProposed
Version2
Rolethesis
Warrantinterpretive
Tagscognition, pragmatics, information-retrieval
Linepragmatic-transport
Bears onQUESTION-096 — When does a communicative cue change what an interpreter can recover from an unchanged internal state, and how can such an addressing effect be told apart from new information, added computation or a changed policy?
Rests onCLAIM-315 — In comparative anchoring tasks, considering an anchor shifts the later numerical estimate without adding evidence about the target, and the shift is carried by anchor-consistent knowledge made more accessible; the shift is established, the accessibility step is inferred and has not been measured
GroundsLIT-269 — Attention Approximates Sparse Distributed Memory, THEORY-335 — Selective accessibility, the account that comparing a target with a plausible anchor makes anchor-consistent knowledge more accessible and that this knowledge carries anchoring, fits the moderations of the effect by applicability, representativeness and plausibility that Strack and Mussweiler found, but its accessibility step is inferred, not measured: Harris et al.'s repetition of the recognition test of it, four times by lexical decision and once by continuous identification, found nothing in five preregistered experiments, with tasks that also missed direct picture priming, THEORY-697 — Sparse distributed memory's read weights each stored pattern by the number of hard locations within the read radius of both query and pattern, a ball-intersection count that falls roughly exponentially in Hamming distance over a local window, so softmax attention over cosine similarity of unit-norm queries and keys, with a fitted inverse temperature, approximates the SDM read there; the approximation cannot hold globally, since the binary count vanishes beyond twice the radius, and its inverse temperature comes from a regression, not from the paper's analytic bound
ComplementsCLAIM-199 — Blackwell's order bounds what a rendering makes possible for any receiver, and a given receiver's access is usable information relative to the rules it can apply, which a garbling can raise for that receiver but never above what the source makes possible, CLAIM-117 — Pragmatic fidelity requires preserving the dynamics of interpretation, not only final judgements: a good transport approximately intertwines source and target framing operations under a correspondence anchored to independently measured distinctions

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The claim

A20 §1: with memory M, evidence E and a cue q(E, a) that an anchor a helps set, the judgement is J = δ(Retrieve(M, q(E, a)), E). “The anchor can change the judgment without adding any valid evidence about the target.” A19 §6: “communication changes not only what information a receiver is given, but the addressing conditions under which existing information becomes recoverable.”

The psychology is not new, though its retrieval step is inferred rather than measured (note of 2026-10-15). Strack and Mussweiler (LIT-1064) and Mussweiler and Strack (LIT-1078) hold that considering an anchor makes anchor-consistent knowledge more accessible to the later judgement. A20: “The new contribution we might pursue isn’t ‘anchoring affects retrieval.’” What is the record’s is placing it in the pragmatic-transport line: a rendering’s effect on a receiver includes what it makes reachable, not only what it carries.

The record holds the mechanism A19 reached for. LIT-269 (Bricken and Pehlevan, read in NOTE-242) shows attention approximates Kanerva’s sparse distributed memory, so a change of query changes what is read out from an unchanged store.

What it bears on

  • CLAIM-199: usable information is relative to the rules a receiver can apply. This adds the cue that selects which apply.
  • CLAIM-117: A20 §6 noted that if a frame changes what is accessible, frame A then B may differ from B then A, “a possible mechanism for order effects”. It “does not, by itself, establish noncommutativity in the specific empirical sense proposed by the claim.”
  • CLAIM-184: an anchor that is easy to reach is reached often. “accessibility is not the same as warrant.”

What it does not say

Not that all anchoring is selective accessibility. A20 named insufficient adjustment and response effects as rival pathways, and said they need not exclude one another.

Note of 2026-10-15: what the anchoring readings leave standing

Three readings bear on the psychological form this claim cites.

  • Strack and Mussweiler 1997 (LIT-1064, NOTE-877). With the anchor number fixed, the anchor’s effect depended on what the comparison made available and whether it applied to the later judgement. But no study measures retrieval. And their model has two stages: accessibility is “not sufficient to guarantee its use and determine the direction of its influence”, and Study 2 turned the same activated knowledge into contrast. So a frame acts on retrieval and on evaluation, and these designs do not separate the two. The defeat condition is restated so that it does not assume they can be.
  • Harris et al. 2019 (LIT-1067, NOTE-876). Five preregistered replications (N = 128 each) of Mussweiler and Strack’s lexical-decision test of accessibility found large anchoring and no accessibility effect, and the same tasks failed to detect direct picture priming. The authors conclude the method is unfit as a test, not that the theory is false, and that the earlier evidence from it “is not a strong part of the evidence base”. Their leading account of durable anchoring is a provisional answer formed at the comparison and recalled later, which sits exactly on this claim’s unresolved split: if the carrier is a recalled number, the frame acts on what is answered, not on what is reachable.
  • Mussweiler and Strack 1999 (LIT-1078) could not be fetched.

The claim stays Proposed. Its psychological form is a theory with indirect support, and the communicative extension rests on it.

Note of 2026-10-15: split under ADR-043

ADR-043’s pilot found this claim compound: an empirical claim about anchoring in judgement tasks, and the record’s interpretive extension to communication in general. The empirical half is now CLAIM-315, on which this claim rests, and this claim is marked interpretive. Its title already states the general form, so it was kept; what changed is that its psychological support is a separate claim with its own warrant and standing.

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