3. Stances — who believes what

Foci and links describe the content of an argument. A stance records an agent’s relationship to it — who holds, doubts, chooses, or rejects something, and how confidently.

The readable form is <agent> <posture> <target>:

ops-agent holds cache-is-safe
  confidence 0.9
  note Shipping — the load test passed.

This says the agent ops-agent holds the focus cache-is-safe, at confidence 0.9, with a note recording the rationale. (confidence and note are covered fully in chapter 5 — for now, just know they ride on the stance.)

Postures

A posture is the verb. There are twelve:

Some postures create foci for you

Five postures bring a new focus into being and infer its kind, so you don’t have to declare it separately:

So this:

analyst noticed metric-shift
  Activation rose after the deploy.

creates the focus metric-shift (kind observation) and a stance (analyst noticed metric-shift) in one line. If a focus already exists with an explicit kind, that kind wins — a posture’s inferred kind never overrides one you stated outright.

The other postures (doubts, accepts, asks, rejects, revises) reference an existing target rather than creating one.

Two postures take a richer form

• suspects proposes a link and takes a stance on it:

  analyst suspects ai-automation causes job-displacement as displacement-hypothesis
    confidence 0.45..0.70
  

  This creates the two foci, a causes link aliased displacement-hypothesis, and a stance in which the analyst suspects that link. (Note the confidence is a range — see chapter 5.)

• infers draws a conclusion from one or more sources, wiring a supports link from each:

  analyst infers adaptation-too-slow from ai-capability-surge, reskilling-lag
    confidence 0.60
  

note vs. body

For a posture that creates a focus, the indented prose becomes that focus’s body. For one that doesn’t, the prose becomes a note on the stance. Either way, an explicit note field always attaches to the stance — so even holds and chooses can carry rationale on the stance itself.

Multiple agents

Different agents can take different stances on the same target — that’s how you record a disagreement:

worker accepts displacement-hypothesis
  confidence 0.80
economist doubts displacement-hypothesis
  confidence 0.35

If one agent takes contradictory postures on the same target (e.g. accepts and rejects), ThoughtML warns — see Diagnostics.

Our document so far

focus cache-is-safe
  kind claim
  The new cache layer is safe to ship today.

focus load-test-passed
  kind observation
  Load test at 2x peak traffic passed with no errors.

focus stale-reads
  kind observation
  Staging showed stale reads under cache eviction.

link load-test-passed supports cache-is-safe
link stale-reads opposes cache-is-safe

ops-agent holds cache-is-safe
  confidence 0.9
  note Shipping — the load test passed.

This is already a complete, meaningful document. Before we hand it to the mirror, two more building blocks: questions and numbers.