Observation and description

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

Epistemic purpose

• Establish a credible record of a phenomenon, its variability, and what remains unobserved.

When this mode helps

• A survey, catalog, map, or time series addresses a scientific uncertainty. Record detection, coverage, and missingness; do not treat a processing output as a direct observation of every inferred quantity.

Agent actions and representations

• Inspect metadata; map coverage; characterize distributions; compare recording conditions; identify gaps; choose the next observation under a resource budget.
• 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

• Coverage, completeness, measurement response, and traceable processing must support the descriptive scope. A unique event can be documented even when the event cannot recur.
• 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

• If a pattern needs characterization, enter exploration; if the target is latent, enter estimation; if the observation chain is suspect, enter instrumentation or robustness.
• Neighbouring profiles: exploration, estimation, instruments, robustness.

Characteristic failure

• Coverage or detection thresholds masquerade as physical patterns; an exhaustive catalog produces no gain relevant to the question.

Human evidence and borrowing

• Primary cases: coastal traces in Atwater (1987) and observing programs in Becker et al. (2019). Bogen and Woodward (1988) offers the philosophical distinction between data and phenomena. These sources motivate the profile; they do not validate an agent policy.
• Cross-field comparison: Compare catalog practices with exploratory high-energy physics in Karaca (2013a) and its correction Karaca (2013b); transfer attention to observation conditions, not the physics.
• Science of process/impact: Fortunato et al. (2018) supplies broad metascience context. Mode prevalence and gains from this procedure in geoscience have not been estimated here.
• 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

• A case gains an adequately characterized feature or resolves a consequential coverage limitation. Test a catalog with changed detection sensitivity; require a justified next observation, not a fictitious new phenomenon.
• 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

Atwater, Brian F. 1987. “Evidence for great Holocene earthquakes along the outer coast of Washington state.” Science 236 (4804): 942–44. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.236.4804.942.

Becker, Keir, James A. Austin, Neville Exon, et al. 2019. “Fifty Years of Scientific Ocean Drilling.” Oceanography 32 (1): 17–21. https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2019.110.

Bogen, James, and James Woodward. 1988. “Saving the Phenomena.” The Philosophical Review 97 (3): 303. https://doi.org/10.2307/2185445.

Fortunato, Santo, Carl T. Bergstrom, Katy Börner, et al. 2018. “Science of Science.” Science 359 (6379). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao0185.

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.