Context
On 2026-10-22, after the filing of the exchange “Graph Learning Applications” and its branch, the owner relayed a proposal, “Toward a controlled vocabulary for Nucleation”. Its starting point: “Several of our most important conclusions depend on distinctions that the prose sometimes preserves locally but the vocabulary does not yet enforce consistently.” Its central rule:
The organization of a perspective, its causal efficacy, its attribution to an agent, its historical persistence, and its possible role in constituting that agent are different claims. None should be inferred from another without an argument.
The record bears it out. Across its claims, questions, terms and readings, “effective” appears 395 times in 192 files, “organized” 172 times in 80, “grounded” 88 times in 52, “constituted by” 48 times in 27, and “exhausted by” 9 times in 6. The review of the same day (workbench entry 16:33:52) found three places where the filing had already let one sense stand for another: persistence for remembered continuity, a perspective for one carrier, and a party’s organization for a single perspective.
The record already has some of the grammar. TERM-045, TERM-071 and TERM-072 are “X, and which sense” terms. TERM-055 (operational availability), TERM-065 (effective-description regime) and TERM-053 (endorsement) are three different technical objects that the bare word “effective” can hide. TERM-038 separates descriptive, causal and constitutive relations, though for communicative acts only. TERM-044 and TERM-063 are rival criteria of agency, left unsettled on purpose.
Decision
Proposed, for the owner’s adoption.
- One new term, one revised. “Organization” gets a term with four senses (TERM-074); relational arrangement is the default and the sense in “organizational perspective”. TERM-072’s note of 2026-10-22 (later) gains the objects a claim about “the same perspective” must choose among: a realization, a kind, a lineage, a distributed realization, a representation.
- No new terms for the rest. “Effective”, “exhausted by”, “constituted by”, “grounded” and “agency” are governed by the table below, not given terms of their own. Five more terms would cost maintenance without adding distinctions the table does not already make.
- The protocol. A claim, question, term or reading that uses one of these in a substantive statement says what the table asks:
| When it says… | it specifies… |
|---|---|
| X is organized | which relations, for what explanatory target, and in which sense of TERM-074 |
| X is one organization | what individuates it |
| P is a perspective | which sense of TERM-072: organizational, represented or phenomenal |
| P is the same perspective | the same realization, kind, lineage or continuing distributed arrangement |
| X exercises agency, or is an agent | which candidate system, under which criterion (TERM-044 or TERM-063) |
| X is effective | the causal target, the task, the availability conditions (TERM-055) or the evaluation regime (TERM-065); “warranted”, “legitimate” or “justified” when the claim is normative |
| X exhausts Y | whether descriptively, explanatorily or constitutively, and for what purpose; and not a depleted resource or a finished search |
| X constitutes Y | the account of constitution, not a correlation or a successful prediction |
| X is grounded | whether in acquisition, semantic content, situated activation, or the material or social conditions of enactment |
| P is interrupted | whether in activation, enactment or reproduction (CLAIM-421) |
| X has authority | whether practical or justified, and which of CLAIM-403’s stages |
- The six adjectives. The proposal’s summary, adopted as the rule’s gloss: “‘Organized’ is a structural claim. ‘Effective’ is a causal or task-relative claim. ‘Agentic’ is a claim about a system’s capacities under an agency criterion. ‘Self-governing’ is a stronger organizational claim. ‘Constitutive’ is an ontological claim. ‘Phenomenal’ is a claim about experience.”
- Ordinary uses are exempt. The protocol applies to terminology carrying a substantive explanatory, causal, ontological or normative inference; it does not require explicit sense-indexing for unambiguous ordinary-language uses. “The team organized the meeting” needs nothing; “the organization of interpretation constitutes a higher-level agent” must say what organization, constitutes and agent mean. (Added the same day after a review the owner relayed.)
- Scope. New and revised entries from adoption on. Existing entries are not rewritten in bulk; a flagged word in an older entry is fixed when that entry is next revised for another reason.
Alternatives
- A term for every word. The proposal rejected it, and so does this decision: five terms on usage would need maintaining in every line, and the table says the same in one place.
- A note in a curation entry only. The proposal offered it. A curation entry is a journal, read once; a usage rule needs to be findable from the decisions index, where the record’s other rules about itself are.
- A lint pattern now. DP-3 says a norm repeated in corrections should be walked up from prose to mechanism. But a pattern that flags every “effective” would fire 395 times on current text, and most uses are already indexed by context. The mechanism waits for the owner’s adoption and for a narrower pattern, such as bare “effective” or “exhausted by” in a claim’s title.
- Status quo. The cost is the one the review of 2026-10-22 found: a sense slipping into another in a filing, caught only by a reader who happened to check.
Consequences
- Adoption is the owner’s. Until then the table is a convention filers may follow, and this filing’s new entries already do in part.
- CLAIM-278’s objection stays in force against the vocabulary itself: “A vocabulary flexible enough to describe every arrangement doesn’t thereby explain them” (the relayed proposal). Each sense must let a claim say something that could be wrong.
- If adopted, the natural follow-up is a lint pattern for the narrowest cases, and a decision on whether TERM-038’s three relations widen beyond communicative acts, as the proposal assumed.