066-Claims declare modality in text, and passes repair mode mismatch

Type: ../types/adr.md · Status: accepted

Status: accepted — decision 4 amended by ADR 080 (2026-08-26): the full pass no longer converts mode in-pass; a mode mismatch is a pending revise whose brief names the target mode and its guard Date: 2026-08-19

Context

Review defeats claims with counterexamples, and every repair the pipeline offered weakened the claim: qualify, narrow, reframe down, or delete. Author-side guidance sweeps drafts for absolutes before review, so both pressures point the same way. Three worked episodes showed the cost: crisp claims with genuine unification were walked into hedged or checklist forms with no step where anyone asked whether the strong claim was the more useful artifact, and a full corpus survey found 22 modality-mismatched notes — statistical claims stated as universals with the modality leaking into body hedges, tendency claims hedged past refutability, and ideal-type reasoning practiced without a label (the "clean model / degraded variant" cluster).

The counter-machinery was tested before adoption. The two-stage idealization criterion (pricing routes an exception to assessment; adequacy decides) survived a full pass on its own note, and the first in-pass adequacy assessment ran against a partially open record: the gate attacked the declared commitment on its merits, treated open dimensions as open rather than as defeats, and refused acceptance on pricing evidence alone — with no new verdict, trait, or gate, because the declared commitments were ordinary note content.

Decision

  1. Three claim modes, refuter-defined. Universal (one genuine counterexample refutes), statistical (only prevalence evidence refutes; the claim must state what prevalence would refute it), ideal-type (a declared first-order model; refuted by unpriced-ordinary exceptions or dominance failure). Declared in kb/notes/COLLECTION.md under "Claim modality" — the binding surface the full pass reads.
  2. Modality lives in the claim text, not frontmatter. Title, thesis, or a named section carries the mode; an ideal-type claim carries its adequacy record (declared use, omitted mechanism, consequence bound, explanatory dominance) in the body. Undeclared text reads as universal. Rationale: the premise-decomposition gate quotes premises verbatim, so in-text modality is tested automatically, as the in-pass assessment demonstrated, while a frontmatter field would be a second copy of claim semantics that can drift. Mode is orthogonal to lifecycle stage (a status-conjecture note declares both when both apply).
  3. The premise-decomposition gate reads premises at their stated modality and annotates every non-HOLDS premise's counterexample shape — instance, prevalence, or priced-exception — as routed attention, never a verdict.
  4. The full pass repairs mode mismatch through the existing keep-reframe, mode-guarded and bidirectional. Counterexample shapes route the target mode. Guards: a statistical retitle must state its refuter or the reframe fails as vacuous; an ideal-type conversion must write the adequacy record into the body, where the closing cycle's premise rerun attacks it — that closing attack is the conversion's required resistance. A claim hedged below its warrant is the same finding in reverse, reframed up.
  5. Conversions outside a pass remain permitted; the mode guards bind whoever converts, and the next full pass supplies the deferred attack, since the record is content the premise gate tests by default.

Consequences

  • The 22 surveyed candidates are repairable by ordinary full passes; no migration or batch operation is needed.
  • The narrowing-direction guards gain mode-specific companions: the refuter test already polices analytic narrowing; the stated-refuter guard polices vacuous statistical landings; the adequacy record polices immunized ideal-type landings.
  • No frontmatter modality field ships. If corpus sweeps later need to enumerate declared ideal-type or statistical claims mechanically, addressability can be added then, under the derived-copy rule (checked or absent).
  • Adopted in part from the design proposal "Repair dispositions for defeated claims are an epistemic policy with an option space", which keeps its undecided remainder: profile-level repair-policy declaration and freshness-store drift tracking for pricing attestations.