Exploratory inquiry

Drafted human-editable specification · v0.4.0 · no agent-performance claim

Epistemic purpose

• Develop phenomena, questions, candidate relationships, and useful representations.

When this mode helps

• The question, target phenomenon, or representation is still developing. Background theory and provisional hypotheses may be present; absence of a hypothesis is not the recognition rule.

Agent actions and representations

• Inspect and visualize; vary conditions; compare representations; follow anomalies; generate candidates; frame or reframe questions; preserve abandoned branches and search history.
• Inputs: the question, available evidence and provenance, constraints, prior claims, and remaining budget.
• Outputs: inspectable artifacts, updated question/evidence state, and a claim record when a substantive claim is made.

Evidence and claim scope

• A provisional pattern needs credible provenance and an appropriate initial reliability check. Stronger generalization needs further evidence. Record which data suggested the pattern; do not present that inspection as a prospective test.
• Distinguish a warranted decision at the time from a claim’s later assessed adequacy; append follow-up without rewriting the original record.

Transitions and stopping

• Investigate possible artifacts through instruments or robustness; estimate a developed observable; assess rival explanations when they make distinguishable predictions. Stop or reframe when follow-up has low scientific value under the budget.
• Neighbouring profiles: observation, estimation, hypothesis, instruments, robustness.

Characteristic failure

• Reject a unique event before investigating it; mistake a selection artifact for a finding; retrofit an exploratory outcome as a prediction.

Human evidence and borrowing

• Steinle (1997) and Karaca (2013a) are historical/philosophical analyses of exploratory practice; consult Karaca (2013b). Rouet-Leduc et al. (2017) is a geoscience case for distinguishing discovery from subsequent assessment.
• Cross-field comparison: The high-energy physics case informs variation and representation change. The transferable procedure is an explicit question, not a claim that all exploration is theory-free.
• Science of process/impact: Yaqub (2018) organizes serendipity; Foster et al. (2015) measures research strategies in biomedicine. Neither establishes the gain from this specific geoscience agent policy.
• The actions and transitions above are design hypotheses derived from these sources, not established optimal policies. Missing process chronology remains unknown.

Evaluation against past work

• Produce a credible candidate and a discriminating follow-up that could advance the question. Compare a real-looking artifact with an unusual valid observation; report candidate quality and follow-up usefulness separately from confirmed advance.
• Use the historical evaluation to choose a source record, preserve evidence boundaries, and assess a meaningful gain. A synthetic control tests a constructed case, not a historical discovery.
• Assessment definitions · Agent implementation

Foster, Jacob G., Andrey Rzhetsky, and James A. Evans. 2015. “Tradition and Innovation in Scientists’ Research Strategies.” American Sociological Review 80 (5): 875–908. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122415601618.

Karaca, Koray. 2013a. “The Strong and Weak Senses of Theory-Ladenness of Experimentation: Theory-Driven versus Exploratory Experiments in the History of High-Energy Particle Physics.” Science in Context 26 (1): 93–136. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889712000300.

Karaca, Koray. 2013b. “The Strong and Weak Senses of Theory-Ladenness of Experimentation: Theory-Driven Versus Exploratory Experiments in the History of High-Energy Particle Physics – ERRATUM.” Science in Context 26 (4): 665–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889713000215.

Rouet-Leduc, Bertrand, Claudia Hulbert, Nicholas Lubbers, Kipton Barros, Colin J. Humphreys, and Paul A. Johnson. 2017. “Machine Learning Predicts Laboratory Earthquakes.” Geophysical Research Letters 44 (18): 9276–82. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL074677.

Steinle, Friedrich. 1997. “Entering New Fields: Exploratory Uses of Experimentation.” Philosophy of Science 64 (S4): S65–74. https://doi.org/10.1086/392587.

Yaqub, Ohid. 2018. “Serendipity: Towards a taxonomy and a theory.” Research Policy 47 (1): 169–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.10.007.