ifc-0229

16.9 An evidence hierarchy

The Prometheus substrates and controlled SGTE experiments reach finite ontology construction inside a supplied grammar. They do not demonstrate unrestricted autonomous ontology construction. The following registered hierarchy separates the evidence already obtained from progressively stronger construction claims:

Stage	Withheld structure	Construction	Primary test
SGTE–0	nothing	reproduce baseline and adapter	provenance, units, resets, and reference outputs
SGTE–1	one support pattern or mechanism surrogate in a known family	support signature or calibrated equivalence class	held-out measurements and false-extension controls
SGTE–2	mechanism and observer	uncertainty-aware probe	coverage, selective accuracy, and abstention
SGTE–3	discriminating experiment	active measurement or intervention policy	power and time to decision at matched cost
SGTE–4	ontology object or factorization	sketch and interface extension	conservativity, irreducibility, and prediction gain
SGTE–5	domain presentation	transport to a new package	typed reuse without semantic leakage

SGTE–1 through –4 are separate controlled studies, not cumulative stages of one run. In particular, the synthetic acquisition result in SGTE–3 does not inherit biological semantics from SGTE–1 or –2, and the mediator-shaped latent factor in SGTE–4 does not inherit their observer or acquire a causal interpretation. The evidence reported here stops at SGTE–4; SGTE–5 and AGENTIC-SIM remain benchmark specifications.

Every stage must include closed worlds in which no extension is needed and unsupported worlds outside the registered repair language. A system that always adds a latent variable is uncalibrated. A system that predicts outputs without constructing the withheld typed object has solved a modeling task, not the registered theory-construction task.