Glossary

Agent — the actor a stance attributes a belief to (ops-agent, analyst, team, me). Just an identifier; not a defined entity.

Argument status — the grounded Dung label of a node: in (survives every attack), out (defeated), or undecided. Opt-in (--status).

Attack — an opposes or undercuts link. The only relations that affect argument status.

Basis — the provenance of an authored number: measured, estimated, or assumed.

Body — the free-text prose under a record’s header.

Canonical model — the normalized, ordered array of typed objects the parser emits as JSON. The interchange form of the language.

Conflict — a mirror finding: a place the computed reading disagrees with what the author asserted. Distinct from a diagnostic.

Derived confidence — a per-claim strength the mirror computes by propagating evidence, separate from authored confidence. Opt-in (--derived).

Desugar — the step that turns the readable action surface (agent posture target) into canonical core objects.

Diagnostic — an error or warning about a document’s form (vs. a conflict, about its coherence).

Focus — a node you reason about; the basic unit. Has a kind.

Kind — a focus’s semantic category (observation, claim, decision, …).

Leverage — how load-bearing one evidence edge is: the change in its target’s derived confidence when the edge is removed. Opt-in (--sensitivity).

Link — a typed, directed edge with a relation.

Mirror — ThoughtML’s opt-in second reading of a document. “A mirror, not an oracle”: it reports disagreements, it never decides.

Orphan — a focus nothing connects to. Flagged as a warning.

Posture — the verb in a stance (holds, doubts, chooses, …).

Profile — a declaration of custom vocabulary (kinds/relations/fields/postures) a document’s dialect adds.

Quantity — an authored numeric measure with a unit and a dimension. A computed result is a separate computed_quantity.

Relation — the type of a link (supports, causes, leads-to, …). Twelve in v0.1.0.

Scope — a grouping of records that can cascade context onto its members.

Stance — an agent’s relationship to a target, optionally with confidence.

Strict-clean — parsing with zero errors and zero warnings under default options. Every bundled example must be strict-clean.

Supersession — marking a belief replaced by a later one (via revises), without deleting it. The basis of the as-of view.

Weight — a link’s evidential strength, 0..1. (Distinct from probability, the outcome likelihood on a leads-to edge.)