Chirality13. Distinctions used in this book
These terms express distinctions that the argument uses. The thesis glossary develops their conceptual background. In a particular undertaking, their use still depends on identifying the actual subject and conditions.
| Term | Meaning in this account |
|---|---|
| Accountability | Answerability for commitments and consequences. Execution responsibility can be delegated without transferring the person's responsibility for reliance. |
| Reckoning | The investigation, interpretation, inference, planning, criticism, checking and adaptive action that this framework attributes to the agent. |
| Judgment | The person's situated, committed engagement with what the work means, what matters and what they will stand behind. |
| Knowledge | A knower's situated achievement of understanding. It can be incomplete, mistaken or revised. |
| Information | Material that can be recorded, transmitted and compared. It can support knowing without being identical with it. |
| Commitment | In a production contract, an adopted obligation. In the account of judgment, the person's engagement with what they will stand behind. The subject and context show which of these related senses applies. |
| Assumption | A provisional basis for reasoning. Its grounds and consequences remain open to examination. |
| Proposal | A candidate choice. Permission to develop it does not imply its acceptance. |
| Observation | An account of what occurred under identified conditions. |
| Claim | An assertion about a subject. Its grounds, if any, and its limits can be examined. |
| Evidence | Observation or reasoning that supports an identified claim under stated conditions. |
| Capability | What a participant or tool can do under the stated conditions. |
| Authorization | Authority to undertake an action within the assignment and the governing commitments. |
| Host permission | A technical allowance or restriction that a controlled execution path enforces. |
| Agent 0 | Responsibility for purpose, alignment and continuity with the person, including keeping reserved choices visible. |
| Role | A description of a contribution and its responsibility. Its name alone grants neither authority nor host permission. |
| Contribution owner | The participant responsible for assigned work through examination, repair and transfer. |
| Integration owner | The participant responsible for how contributions become a usable combined result. |
| Deliverable | An intended contribution with conditions and assigned responsibility. It is distinct from the files or identifiers that represent it. |
| Production contract | The connection among a contribution, its outputs, the governing criteria, the interfaces and the basis for examination. |
| Dependency condition | What a consumer needs from a supplier, and at what point. |
| Integration | Bringing related contributions into a usable result and examining their relationships and remaining conditions. |
| Source integration | Bringing a change into a selected source revision, for example by a Git merge. |
| Completion | Fulfillment of agreed work and its required examination within the authorized scope. |
| Edition | An identified state of a work, made available for selection, with its own content and standing. |
| Maintained source | The source that can continue to develop after an edition is identified. Later changes do not silently alter that edition. |
| Delivery | Transfer of an identified result with the information and continuing responsibilities that its use needs. |
| Acceptance | An authorized act concerning an identified subject, scope and purpose. |
| Release | Authorization to make an identified result available for a stated audience or use. |
| Reliance | Use of a contribution as a basis for a decision or action, with responsibility for that use. |
| Verification | Examination of conformity to specified requirements, or to an identified claim or reference. |
| Validation | Examination of fitness for intended use. Narrower uses of the term in tools need their actual subject identified. |
| Reflection | Examination, with the person, of the meaning, framing and usefulness of the work or the practice. It can support retention as well as change. |
| Reconciliation | Comparison of actual results and evidence with the affected commitments and descriptions, and transfer of warranted corrections into the sources that own them. |
Sources
The philosophical distinctions draw on The Chirality Framework, particularly its account of knowing, judgment and the accountability gap. The maintained thesis contains the fuller argument, the references and the dated evidence. This book does not extend the empirical claims of the thesis by restating them. The source revision and content identity of this edition accompany its rendered form. The publication index distinguishes discovery of an edition from adoption of its content.
Chirality in Practice · Edition 1 · Author-approved text · Source 9e79abf76d ↗ · Markdown for your agent