Appendix B — Evidence and Claim Language
The evidence ladder and wording rules behind every evidence box in this book.
The ladder
E0 conceptual / illustrative — a sketch. Says "consider", never "measured".
E1 sourced external claim — a primary paper or doc, cited. Says "X reports".
E2 executable example — code or schema that ran once. Says "we ran".
E3 measured experiment — protocol written and frozen before the run, qualified observer, frozen result.
E4 replicated result — E3 repeated across conditions, with negative arms kept.
E5 mechanically verified property — deterministic check over a fixture set.
Wording rules
- A critic preferring a candidate is not “better”. The required form is: under rubric R, candidate B scored higher than A in N seeded trials.
- Agreement is not verification. Retrieval is not exposure; exposure is not influence; influence is not utility. Each link needs its own evidence.
- Revision is a candidate until adjudicated. Scores are reported with disagreement, never as a single accuracy number.
- Allowed shorthands: observed (E2+), measured (E3+ with numbers and budget), supported (E3+ beating a baseline), suggests (single-condition E3), consistent with (alternatives open), did not distinguish, inconclusive, not tested, speculative (E0, labeled).
- Forbidden without E3 or higher: improves, helps, better, verifies, proves, preserves intent, earns overhead.
Failure is a result
Inconclusive and negative runs are retained, not re-rolled. Every excluded run carries a category (target / non-target / agent / environment / observer / evaluation failure, protocol violation, inconclusive), a reason, and an evidence pointer. Infrastructure failure is never classified as model failure.