Definition
Manuscript §2: “We use ‘observable’ in an operational rather than narrowly physical sense: a reproducible elicitation or coding procedure that assigns outcomes to communicative realizations. Observable labels may concern lexical register, causal relations, speaker alignment, entitlement to criticize, or a plausible continuation. Such measurements are not necessarily independent; some are constituted through contrasts with alternatives.”
What it is not
Not a physical observable, though A21 and A27 used the word in the quantum sense. C6 §2 gave the operational sense as “labels for observational procedures”; the contrastive clause is the structuralist turn of U36 (the chunk-5 reader’s observation). The levels it is organized by are TERM-009.