Standing Research Commitments

Four commitments run through the whole thesis and discipline the claims made in individual chapters. They are gathered here so that the stance behind a claim made in one chapter can be read against the standard the thesis holds itself to everywhere.

Modularity claims are frame-dependent. Wherever the thesis calls something modular, it states the unit being decomposed, the interaction basis by which that unit is judged separable, and the horizon over which the judgement is meant to hold. A modularity claim with those three elements left implicit is, on this commitment, incomplete. The commitment aligns the definitional work of Chapter 2 with the theory of Chapter 3.

Boundary claims require explicit, reviewable interface conditions. A claim that a boundary exists is treated as valid only where the interface conditions that constitute the boundary are made explicit and can be reviewed by a reader. The axioms of Chapter 3 and the concept glossary supply those conditions, so that a boundary is a stated relation rather than an asserted one.

Coordination reduction is bounded and testable, not absolute. Where the thesis argues that its design reduces coordination, it means a bounded, measurable reduction rather than the elimination of coordination altogether. The properties of Chapter 3 and the evaluation of Chapter 10 keep the claim quantitative, with a measured magnitude rather than a categorical assertion.

Concept-first standardisation preserves residual ambiguity. Standardising from concepts rather than from surface text is held to a further commitment: residual ambiguity is preserved and made visible rather than resolved by fiat. The artefact commitments of Chapter 5 carry the residuals forward as explicit, flagged content instead of suppressing them to manufacture a cleaner result.