Synthesis and reconstruction

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

Epistemic purpose

• Integrate evidence into a constrained historical account or a new scientific connection.

When this mode helps

• Different traces, studies, or representations bear on an account. Reconstruction can involve new sampling or experiments; no-intervention is not a recognition rule.

Agent actions and representations

• Assemble sources and dependencies; propose rival accounts; align time and scale; assess trace preservation; identify discriminating evidence; test a proposed connection.
• 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

• Trace provenance, dependence, and compatibility must support the account’s scope. An event may be unique while its traces and analysis admit independent checks.
• 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

• Seek a discriminating trace through hypothesis assessment; use estimation for dates or physical quantities; return to exploration when accounts remain underconstrained.
• Neighbouring profiles: hypothesis, estimation, exploration, robustness.

Characteristic failure

• Treat correlated traces as independent; replace primary records with retellings; mistake a plausible literature connection for a tested result.

Human evidence and borrowing

• Atwater (1987) and Nelson et al. (1996) provide Cascadia cases; Cleland (2001) and Cleland (2002) supply methodological arguments. Historical chronology must be sourced rather than inferred from article order.
• Cross-field comparison: Swanson (1986) motivates connecting separate literatures; Nersessian (2022) supplies a process comparison for integration. Neither guarantees transfer to a particular Earth-science question.
• Science of process/impact: Shi and Evans (2023) associates content/context surprise with citation impact; Sourati and Evans (2023) studies human-aware discovery. These motivate transfer hypotheses, not a universal breadth recipe.
• 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 better-constrained history or an independently supported connection. Include dependent traces, a plausible incompatible account, and an integration that fails an assumption check.
• 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.

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.

Nelson, Alan R., Ian Shennan, and Antony J. Long. 1996. “Identifying coseismic subsidence in tidal-wetland stratigraphic sequences at the Cascadia subduction zone of western North America.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 101 (B3): 6115–35. https://doi.org/10.1029/95JB01051.

Nersessian, Nancy J. 2022. Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14667.001.0001.

Shi, Feng, and James Evans. 2023. “Surprising Combinations of Research Contents and Contexts Are Related to Impact and Emerge with Scientific Outsiders from Distant Disciplines.” Nature Communications 14 (1): 1641. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36741-4.

Sourati, Jamshid, and James A. Evans. 2023. “Accelerating science with human-aware artificial intelligence.” Nature Human Behaviour 7 (10): 1682–96. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01648-z.

Swanson, Don R. 1986. “Fish Oil, Raynaud’s Syndrome, and Undiscovered Public Knowledge.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 30 (1): 7–18. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.1986.0087.