1.9 An initial acquisition contract

An acquired sketch should be evaluated before it is treated as the maintained theory. We use the following contract.

. An initial sketch acquisition claim must declare:

1. the instruction, demonstration, feedback, intervention, and prior-theory channels made available to the learner;

2. the typed objects, arrows, equations, observers, and generative operations acquired from those channels;

3. the provenance and confidence of each acquired component;

4. at least one held-out composition or transfer task not copied directly from a demonstration;

5. counterexamples that test whether salient surface features were mistaken for functional invariants;

6. unsupported alternatives on which the learner must abstain; and

7. the interface through which later assimilation and accommodation may update the sketch.

This contract separates sketch acquisition from behavioral cloning. A learner can reproduce familiar trajectories while possessing no reusable task theory. Conversely, it can acquire a useful structural theory while its motor execution remains inferior to the expert’s. The two achievements should be measured separately.

It also separates acquisition from creativity. Faithfully importing a theory supplied by a teacher may solve the initialization problem without constructing anything novel. An acquisition episode supports a creative claim only when it proposes structure absent from the available instruction, demonstrations, feedback, and prior theory, and when the provenance record and held-out tests distinguish that construction from copying or paraphrase. The same episode may therefore contain an acquisitional step and a separately admitted creative step; the audit record should not collapse them.