theory-builder

Type: types/tag-readme.md

Systems that apply Popper's conjecture and refutation to theories they state: the theories sit in localized units of natural or formal language, guide what the system does through what they say, meet criticism aimed at what they say, and the result of criticism shapes the next round. The defining note is theory builder; whether such a builder learns is the hypothesis under test, not part of the definition. Notes here cover its theories, their criticism, and program theory; the search, evaluation, and retention loop belongs to improvement-loop. A child of self-improving-systems.

Definitions and the research program

• Theory builder — the four conditions: localized content, guidance through content, criticism of content, iteration
• Tentative theory — the status of every retained theory; it licenses no use
• Addressable theory — the graded structural property that lets criticism name a part and revision keep the rest
• Reach-assessment — judging whether a commitment's claimed explanatory-reach is genuine, across representational forms
• Commonplace builds a theory builder and tests whether it learns — the research program and its comparisons
• Theory building has distinct epistemic, structural, and implementation precedents — resembling one precedent does not establish the others
• Mechanistic constraints make Popperian KB recommendations actionable — bounded context requires conjecture and refutation; three KB practices follow
• Missing rationale does not exclude a theory builder; weight-only retention does — membership tested on three external reports

Criticizing and assessing theories

• Competing causal theories can guide distinguishing experiments — unresolved explanations can specify what evidence to seek next, even when their observational predictions agree
• A claim's warrant does not determine its fit in a working theory — warrant and fit are separate questions a builder must answer separately
• System use selects theory fit without a fixed oracle — live use selects for fit where no oracle decides it
• System use provides evidence of theory fit, not independent warrant — the limit of that selection: warrant still needs independent evidence
• Revision guided by rationale needs faithfulness, not just legibility — misleading rationale directs repair to the wrong premise
• A theory's prototype standing is its revision cost — external binding plus lost investment, independent of representational form
• Causal and proof obligations assess explanatory-reach formally — reach-assessment in symbolic systems
• World models assess explanatory-reach through action-conditioned prediction — reach-assessment in learned parametric models
• Cost-sensitive formalisms for tentative theory search — exploratory map of models that expose search budgets

Program theory and use

• Open-ended construction builds an object and a theory of it — why construction that discovers an object's organization also produces a theory of it
• Holding a program theory means sustaining coherent search under delayed feedback — possession is tested by coherent search, not a right first change
• Project-theory possession compares new demands with existing organization — relating a demand to existing responsibilities before adding parallel structure
• Natural-language project state may specialize weight-resident search heuristics — stated theory and history steer heuristics the model already holds
• Methodology and its live theory fallback form a two-layer execution system — where theory still executes once methodology exists
• Theory building and capacity building make the same kind of fallible commitment — explanatory and constructive commitments differ in how they are retracted
• Retained theories may improve sample efficiency under structured shifts — the open payoff conjecture for retaining theories
• Citing retained theory at the decision point is a mediation trace — cheap evidence a theory was consumed, not that it was used well
• A retained-theory intervention isolates one surface — what an ablation can show, and what it cannot
• The 2026-08-30 Commonplace revision used retained theory to guide computational search — observed episode; the operator selected for global fit

Related Tags

• self-improving-systems — the parent: one way a system changes its own organization
• improvement-loop — the search and retention machinery; shares the theory-guided-search notes
• software-factory — an open-domain theory builder becomes a software house when new domains require changes to its production machinery
• reflection — a reflective builder's method texts meet the same conditions
• warranted-autonomy — which of a builder's decisions computation can take without a human
• continual-learning — learning over time, without the requirement to criticize stated content