Hypothesis assessment

Drafted human-editable specification · v0.4.1 · no agent-performance claim

Epistemic purpose

• Discriminate among explanations or stated expectations using informative evidence.

When this mode helps

• The scientific question concerns alternatives that can have different evidential consequences. Rival generation and discrimination are separate actions.

Agent actions and representations

• Generate substantive rivals; identify auxiliary assumptions; derive differing predictions; choose a discriminating observation; compare results; revise the rival set when needed.
• 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

• State what each outcome supports and what remains unresolved. Evidence need not exclude every imaginable rival to support a bounded claim; shared assumptions and untested alternatives limit its strength.
• 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

• Reframe or return to exploration when all rivals accommodate the available evidence; acquire a new observable; use estimation to quantify the predicted contrast.
• Neighbouring profiles: exploration, theory, estimation, simulation, synthesis.

Characteristic failure

• Verbal variants masquerade as rivals; all alternatives pass the proposed test; an auxiliary assumption absorbs every failure; a causal claim outruns an association.
• The absorbing auxiliary is the Duhem problem (Duhem 1954; Quine 1951): a failed prediction refutes the conjunction of hypothesis, auxiliaries, and conditions, and logic does not say which to drop. This mode runs the whole loop of the unit graph; record at node X which conjunct was revised and why.

Human evidence and borrowing

• Platt (1964) offers a methodological argument; Cleland (2001) and Cleland (2002) distinguish historical and experimental reasoning. Sykes (1967) is the primary tectonic test case, not a controlled evaluation of agents.
• Cross-field comparison: King et al. (2009) illustrates executable hypothesis testing in yeast with assay constraints; borrowing requires identifying which geoscience observations can play the comparable discriminating role.
• Science of process/impact: Si et al. (2025) distinguishes idea ratings from executed research outcomes in NLP. Its results motivate testing rival quality through consequences rather than fluent phrasing.
• 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

• Resolve a scientifically important contrast or demonstrate why current evidence cannot. Include distinguishable rivals, equifinal rivals, and a missing-data case; score gain and unsupported exclusions.
• 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

Cleland, Carol E. 2001. “Historical science, experimental science, and the scientific method.” Geology 29 (11): 987–90. https://doi.org/10.1130/0091-7613(2001)029<0987:HSESAT>2.0.CO;2.

Cleland, Carol E. 2002. “Methodological and Epistemic Differences between Historical Science and Experimental Science.” Philosophy of Science 69 (3): 474–96. https://doi.org/10.1086/342455.

Duhem, Pierre. 1954. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691233857.

King, Ross D., Jem Rowland, Stephen G. Oliver, et al. 2009. “The Automation of Science.” Science 324 (5923): 85–89. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1165620.

Platt, John R. 1964. “Strong Inference.” Science 146 (3642): 347–53. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.146.3642.347.

Quine, W. V. 1951. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” The Philosophical Review 60 (1): 20–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/2181906.

Si, Chenglei, Tatsunori Hashimoto, and Diyi Yang. 2025. “The Ideation-Execution Gap: Execution Outcomes of LLM-Generated Versus Human Research Ideas.” arXiv 2506.20803. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20803.

Sykes, Lynn R. 1967. “Mechanism of earthquakes and nature of faulting on the mid-oceanic ridges.” Journal of Geophysical Research 72 (8): 2131–53. https://doi.org/10.1029/JZ072i008p02131.