10.4.2 Five evidential statuses

10.4.2 Five evidential statuses

The applications use five status classes whose evidential force must not be blurred. A structure is supplied or registered when it enters the frozen experimental contract. It is estimated when its numerical value is recovered from finite observations inside a declared type. It is learned when a rule, representation, or routing policy is fitted from data. It is constructed when the system assembles an artifact that was absent from the frozen reference library, possibly from registered primitives. It is admitted only after the artifact passes the independent certificate declared for its intended use.

These terms form neither a linear pipeline nor a hierarchy of praise. An estimated operator may be rejected; a learned router may select only supplied objects; a constructed program may fail admission; and an admitted repair may be combinational rather than transformational. Conversely, abstention after a well-calibrated estimate can be the correct scientific outcome. Every experiment should therefore report the provenance and status of each object, not only the terminal score.

. Reserve constructed for an artifact absent from the frozen reference library, and reserve admitted for a decision made with evidence not consumed by proposal generation or ranking. Neither word, by itself, implies autonomous or transformational creativity.

The evidentiary verbs used below follow the same discipline. An experiment reports an observed outcome. That outcome supports a claim when it is compatible with the claim under stated controls. It establishes a claim only relative to a frozen contract whose registered gates have all passed. A component satisfies or passes a runtime contract; it does not thereby establish the broader theory that motivated the contract. Proof is reserved for a formal consequence of stated assumptions. Every stronger reading requires a separately named admission environment.