nucleation

TERM-092: 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

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Properties7
StatusActive
Version3
Tagsepistemology, cognition
Linenucleating-argument
ComplementsTERM-065 — effective-description regime: the system, query family, intervention family, resource bounds, tolerance and horizon under which a candidate description's adequacy is assessed, ℛ = (X, 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, ε, τ), kept apart from the description T it evaluates, so that rival descriptions are compared under one regime and whether each is adequate, Adequate(T; ℛ), is settled once the regime is stated, TERM-064 — legibility, of a distinction to an observer for a task: whether the observer, with the rules, categories and resources it actually has, can recover the distinction from what it is given and bring it to bear on the task; a relation among a representation, an observer's rule class, its resources and a task, bounded above by what the source makes possible for an ideal receiver, and directed, since what is legible to a governing institution and what of its governing is legible to others are different relations
Cited as “complements” byTERM-095 — 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
Cited as “uses” byCLAIM-474 — From interconnection to individuation, the relationships are distinct achievements that form a partial order, not a nested sequence: none implies the next, and a later one need not require every earlier one. Interconnection fixes what joint behaviour is possible, compatibility which local descriptions admit a coherent whole, dynamics which organizations persist, individuation which have sufficiently robust identity and boundaries, organizational autonomy which help maintain their own constitutive constraints, and inquiry which can measure and revise their own models and apparatuses under resource bounds, inquiry and reconstruction occurring without autonomy. The research program is to find the conditions for each, and their dependencies, apart from the order in which an inquiry meets them, CLAIM-475 — Specifying is itself a resource-bounded realization: formulating a question takes time, concepts and computation as realizing a configuration takes energy and matter, so the questions an agent can ask are a product of what it has already realized; a stabilized specification is past inquiry stored so that later questions become cheaper to ask, and it can make other questions harder

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Definition

For an agent with concepts K, budget B and horizon H, the inquiry frontier is the set of questions q for which some procedure available to the agent formulates q, making it determinate enough to pursue, within B and H (A17 §§2, 7). Formulating is neither answering nor pursuing: A17 §2’s askable set is “distinct from the investigable and the answerable questions”. Four sets differ:

  • expressible: statable in some language, in principle;
  • askable: on the frontier;
  • investigable: on the frontier, with budget left to pursue it to a stated standard;
  • answerable: having an answer that some process could find.

A question can be expressible and off the frontier. The owner’s U17: “I can’t interrogate a question that takes me more time than I have to even ask it.” A question can also be askable and unanswerable from the evidence available, as below Singer’s information bound (NOTE-1224).

The distinctions it draws

  • From legibility (TERM-064). Legibility is whether a distinction can be recovered for a task already set. The frontier is whether the task can be set at all. A17 §4: “whether the agent can construct the task that would make that distinction relevant.”
  • From the regime (TERM-065). The regime fixes a query family for a comparison. The frontier is where a query family could come from (the note on TERM-065 of 2026-10-27).
  • Movement, not only extent. Reusable specifications, such as a notation, a theory or a schema, move the frontier without enlarging the budget. They can also make other questions harder. A17 §7: “The change could be in the shape of the frontier rather than its total size.”

Why it is proposed

CLAIM-475 is stated in it, and its defeater (b) is a test of frontier movement. CLAIM-474 lists “askable without answerable” among the failures. What would settle it: adoption once the claims stated in it use one of its sets each; rejection if TERM-065 extended to generated query families serves, an extension TERM-065’s note of 2026-10-27 declined.

Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back

CLAIM-475, the claim stated in this term, uses two of its sets: its title and defeater (a) the askable, its §7 (“questions that can meaningfully be investigated”) and defeater (b) (“formulate and pursue”) the investigable. Adoption once CLAIM-475 says which set its defeater (b) tests.

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