Glossary

Glossary

Quick definitions of the terms of art. The full glossary with cross-links lives in the repo: docs/07-glossary.md.

• ABI (Kernel ABI) — the stable contract a subsystem must satisfy to plug into the kernel; conformance is a load-time gate. → Cognitive Kernel ABI
• Abstain — a judge verdict of "not enough evidence"; shown as "no data yet", never a fake zero.
• Belief Revision — automatic lowering of a belief's confidence when reality refutes it.
• Capability — a cognitive faculty the system needs (reasoning, planning, …), distinct from who supplies it. → Capability Provider Model
• Capability Provider — anything that supplies a capability: a model, an API, an agent, a human.
• Cognitive Kernel — owns the event spine, token budget, scheduler, and ABI.
• Constitution — the system's governing rules; amends only by ceremony. → Governance and Constitution
• Context — the kernel object that owns the token budget and guarantees never-overflow.
• Evidence Normalization — a provider's assertion is not evidence; only the filesystem/ledger is.
• Fail-closed — an error in a policy → deny, never allow; not disable-able. → Policy Hook Surface
• Hypothesis — a falsifiable prediction a completed mission stakes instead of "success".
• Judge (versioned) — the grader (rg-1, rg-2, …); its version is pinned into each hypothesis.
• Migration Note — the required companion to any judge-version change.
• Most-restrictive-wins — deny if any policy denies; makes new safety policies monotonic.
• Observed Phenomenon — something the system did, recorded but not yet judged as a fix (vs "bug").
• Outcome Clock — fires at a hypothesis's horizon to trigger grading with zero human intervention.
• Principal — the human with final authority; the only party who may ratify an amendment.
• Provenance Graph — the single canonical store; every belief traceable back to its evidence.
• Sovereignty (of data) — a hard routing constraint: sovereign data is blocked from leaving the box, not merely dispreferred.
• Standing Order — a durable governance directive (e.g. "observation precedes optimization").
• State Ownership Principle — one canonical store of truth; all else is a read-only projection.
• Tripwire — a CI check that fails the build when an architectural invariant is violated.
• Validated Episode — the immutable record written when a hypothesis is confirmed (hash + judge).
• The load-bearing law — Capability must never outrun accountability.