Mixed epistemic status must be preserved below the document level

Type: kb/types/note.md · Tags: evaluation, context-engineering

One prose artifact can contain observations, conclusions entailed by them, and explanations merely compatible with them. A document-level judgment such as “hard evidence” or “plausible reasoning” collapses those differences. KB authoring and review must preserve epistemic status at the level of material claims and inferential transitions.

Whether scientific framing, explicit evidence-and-reasoning sections, or claim-classification steps help LLMs preserve these boundaries is empirical. Their effects should be tested by varying output structure and process structure separately.

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Relevant Notes:

• Process structure and output structure are independent levers — grounds: displaying epistemic categories and requiring their correct classification are distinct interventions
• A bare writing prompt does not determine its intended contribution — evidenced-by: its deductive underdetermination claim and empirical behavior question require different warrants inside one short artifact