A hypothesis is not a fact.

Record contract

Each provisional language hypothesis contains:

• deterministic hypothesis_id;
• observed surface_feature;
• abstract construction_pattern with entity slots;
• candidate semantic operation;
• candidate surface-to-semantic roles;
• distinct contexts seen;
• support and counterexample counts;
• bounded prediction-error history;
• evidence-weighted confidence;
• transfer evidence identifiers;
• monotonic last-update index.

These records live inside DevelopmentalOwenModel snapshots. The v111.4 append journal is mediated by the existing OwenMemoryCore; it is not a second autobiographical or truth store.

Selection behavior

At interpretation time, OWEN extracts lexical, ordered, between-entity and abstract-frame evidence. Multiple candidates compete. Candidates with fewer than two supports or low confidence cannot resolve a relation. A narrow winning margin yields ambiguity rather than a guessed relation.

Feature weighting favours ordered construction evidence over isolated words. A capped whole-frame feature may support an interpretation but cannot establish transfer alone.

Representative developed hypotheses

The full arm produced 280 candidate records. Examples include:

Confidence values are internal evidence summaries, not calibrated probabilities that an answer is correct.

Counterevidence

When the same feature occurs with a different observed semantic signature, the supported candidate is incremented and competing candidates receive counterevidence. The shuffled-context arm created 316 conflicting or incorrect records and scored only 2/17 on the frozen language test, demonstrating that record quantity is not evidence of grounding quality.

Dashboard data

The developmental dashboard contract now includes:

• current utterance and untouched surface;
• canonical candidate;
• semantic hypothesis and role mapping;
• confidence;
• actual world/conversation truth;
• prediction error;
• number of supporting experiences and counterexamples;
• transfer evidence;
• explicit private_chain_of_thought_exposed: false.

This is an evidence replay, not a display of hidden chain-of-thought.

Known limitations

• Construction extraction remains shallow and token-based around known entity mentions.
• Confidence is not fully calibrated and can be overconfident when only one candidate is activated.
• Cross-clause scope and long-distance dependencies remain limited.
• Synonym-like transfer emerges only where surface evidence overlaps enough across experiences.
• New words with no grounded overlap remain unknown—or, in two blind cases, are incorrectly captured by weak shared evidence.
• Speaker style is recorded as context but no mature speaker-conditioned generative model exists.
• Real audio prosody, gesture and open-world perception are outside this bounded source phase.