{"actors":["Literary historian examining a work's reception history","Librarian or research assistant assembling dated reception traces","Research group or editor evaluating the historical explanation"],"affected_objective":"Explain a bounded change in a literary work's documented reception without treating temporal association, archival visibility, or a compelling cultural narrative as a settled causal account.","arm":"ORDINARY_DIVERSE_P2","authority_safety":{"authorized_first_step":"The research group may freeze a bounded reception timeline, label each trace by source and date, and authorize one reversible archival probe that distinguishes the leading explanation from its nearest rival.","decision_authority":"The research group decides whether to retain a ranked plurality or adopt an action-limited working explanation; archive custodians control access, and publication editors retain authority over any historical claim.","excluded_actions":["Rewriting catalog metadata or historical records to conform to the working explanation","Attributing motives to authors, critics, publishers, teachers, or institutions without independent evidence","Presenting temporal sequence or co-occurrence as proof of causation","Suppressing inconvenient traces, missing-data notices, or viable rival explanations","Using the provisional account to assign blame or credit to living people or organizations"],"halt_rollback":"Suspend the working explanation and withdraw dependent causal language if source dates prove unreliable, the apparent inflection disappears under a consistent sampling frame, a predicted precursor is absent, or a rival better explains the timing and distribution of traces."},"baseline":"A reception history that narrates a change in reputation by linking selected reviews, editions, citations, or institutional events into a coherent story without first separating the documented shift from proposed causes or comparing that story with archival and measurement rivals.","candidate_id":"abductive_explanation_selection__literature_literary_theory__ORDINARY_DIVERSE_P2","causal_chain":["A bounded timeline shows an apparent change in how a selected literary work is described, circulated, taught, or cited across two prespecified periods.","Researchers record the dated reception traces, source coverage, and missing intervals separately from any account of why the change occurred.","They construct candidates including increased access through a new edition or translation, institutional adoption, reinterpretation under a later critical framework, broader cultural alignment, and an artifact of archive coverage or indexing.","Candidates are compared by whether their proposed precursors occur before the inflection, whether they explain which venues changed first, whether independent sources converge, how many exceptions they require, and what additional traces they predict.","A candidate becomes the working explanation only if it accounts for the timing and cross-venue pattern better than its nearest rival; otherwise the result remains a ranked plurality.","The working explanation licenses only a bounded search for its predicted precursor, diffusion path, or negative case.","Newly dated records, unchanged comparison works, contradictory venue sequences, or evidence of collection bias trigger reranking or division of a compound explanation.","The resulting reception history retains the observed timeline, live rivals, missing-data limits, and the exact evidence that would warrant revision."],"cell_id":"abductive_explanation_selection__literature_literary_theory","consequence":"An elegant story about rediscovery, ideology, or institutional influence can convert coincident historical traces into an unsupported cause, obscuring archive bias and causing later claims about canon formation or critical change to inherit a fragile premise.","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"This opportunity concerns a corpus-level historical change in documented reception and infers social, institutional, material, or archival causes from dated traces. It does not address the attribution of voice or perspective within a passage, use local narratological cues, or route inquiry through passage annotation and edition comparison.","experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp13_second_slot_policy60_20260806","intervention":"Introduce a Reception Inflection Reconstruction: freeze the work, time window, venues, and observable reception indicators; build a source-audited timeline; generate material, institutional, interpretive, cultural, and archival-artifact explanations; compare their temporal and cross-venue predictions; preserve either a best-so-far account or ranked tie; and authorize only a discriminating archival probe with explicit revision triggers.","mechanism_mapping":[{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a synchronized reconstruction, selected events can be arranged retrospectively into a persuasive sequence even when their dates, venue order, or independence do not support the proposed cause.","mechanism_slug":"forensic_scenario_reconstruction","role":"Builds rival historical sequences connecting proposed precursors to the observed reception inflection while preserving provenance gaps and alternative event orders."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without explicit comparison criteria, familiarity with a canonization narrative or critical school can substitute for evidence that it explains the timing and distribution of the change.","mechanism_slug":"inference_to_best_explanation_matrix","role":"Compares candidates on temporal priority, venue-specific coverage, source independence, mechanism coherence, exception burden, and distinctive predicted traces."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a prospective probe, each newly found review, syllabus, edition, or citation could be absorbed into the favored story regardless of what it says.","mechanism_slug":"disconfirming_probe_plan","role":"Specifies an archive, period, venue, or comparison work where the leading explanation and nearest rival predict different traces."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a dated change record, later accounts may conceal how newly discovered sources, corrected metadata, or collection gaps altered the explanation.","mechanism_slug":"abduction_log","role":"Records candidate rankings, evidence additions, provenance corrections, failed predictions, and reasons for reopening or splitting the account."}],"nearest_rivals":["Descriptive reception history that chronicles reviews, editions, teaching, or citations without selecting among causal explanations","Sociology-of-literature analysis that begins from a specified institutional theory and seeks instances of its expected mechanisms rather than abductively comparing live rivals","Quantitative change-point analysis that detects when reception indicators shift but does not explain the hidden process producing the shift","General contextual interpretation that relates a work to political or intellectual history without a bounded reception explanandum and discriminating archival predictions"],"negative_tests":{"intervention_falsifier":"Using the same frozen reception dataset, the reconstruction is falsified as an operational intervention if reviewers cannot distinguish observation from proposed cause, retain an archival-artifact rival, explain why the leader outranks its nearest rival, or name a feasible finding that would reverse the ranking more consistently than reviewers using an ordinary narrative memo.","problem_falsifier":"The proposed problem is absent in the selected case if the apparent reception change vanishes when the same venues, date rules, and document types are applied across periods, or if a directly documented decision already supplies a sufficient and uncontested explanation for the bounded change.","risks":["Surviving documents may reflect preservation and digitization choices rather than historical reception.","Venue counts may treat unlike forms of attention as comparable indicators.","A single causal story may conceal interacting material, institutional, and interpretive mechanisms.","The selected time boundary may manufacture an apparent inflection.","Negative cases may be unavailable because relevant catalogs, syllabi, correspondence, or circulation records were not retained.","A provisional explanation may be repeated downstream without its missing-data and action limits."],"strongest_counterevidence":"If ordinary reception histories using transparent source criticism already preserve provenance gaps, compare causal rivals, state defeasibility, and derive genuinely discriminating archival checks, the added reconstruction may not supply a distinct investigative benefit."},"next_evidence_step":"Choose one public-domain work and two prespecified adjacent reception periods. From one fixed bibliographic or archival collection, assemble a small timeline containing the same document types in both periods. Give identical records to one reviewer using an ordinary reception-history memo and one using a blank Reception Inflection Reconstruction. Compare only whether each output separates traces from causes, includes the five candidate classes, identifies its nearest rival, states a source-coverage limit, and proposes one archival finding whose two possible outcomes would change the ranking.","observable_state":"For one preselected work, a fixed set of dated sources shows a discontinuity in at least one prespecified reception indicator—such as evaluative vocabulary, edition activity, anthology inclusion, teaching reference, or critical citation—between two bounded periods. The observation record contains source dates, venues, document types, sampling rules, and gaps; labels such as institutional adoption or ideological revaluation appear only in the explanation fields.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","problem":"When dated reviews, editions, syllabi, anthologies, or citations suggest that a literary work's reception changed, a historian must often infer an unobserved process connecting scattered traces. A new edition, institutional adoption, critical reframing, cultural alignment, or a change in archive coverage could produce similar records, yet a coherent historical narrative can be adopted before these rivals and their different temporal predictions are made explicit.","proposal_index":2,"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Unlike a descriptive chronology or theory-led contextual account, the reconstruction permits a causal reception narrative to guide further research only after rival event sequences have been compared against temporal priority, cross-venue diffusion, source independence, missingness, and a probe capable of reranking them.","revision_record":{"claim_changes":["Initial candidate; no prior claim was revised."],"conceptual_changes":["Initial mapping of abductive explanation selection to the historical reconstruction of a bounded literary-reception inflection."],"evidence_changes":["No external evidence, repository material, or prior-art source was consulted."],"operational_changes":["Initial specification of a two-period, fixed-source comparison between an ordinary narrative memo and a reception-inflection reconstruction."],"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Materially independent problem, intervention, and causal path","Observable reception traces separated from causal interpretation","Material, institutional, interpretive, cultural, and archival-artifact rivals","Explicit fit criteria and ranked-plurality option","Defeasibility, authority limits, and rollback triggers","Problem and intervention falsifiers","Bounded first evidence step"]},"schema_version":1,"structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Surprising observation and explanandum boundary","domain_realization":"A discontinuity in prespecified reception indicators for one work across fixed periods, bounded to explaining that change rather than the work's intrinsic value."},{"archetype_element":"Observation–interpretation separation","domain_realization":"Dated reviews, editions, anthology entries, teaching references, citations, venue identities, sampling rules, and gaps are recorded separately from causal labels."},{"archetype_element":"Candidate explanation set","domain_realization":"Access through edition or translation, institutional adoption, later critical reframing, cultural alignment, and archive or indexing artifact remain visible alternatives."},{"archetype_element":"Explanatory fit comparison","domain_realization":"Rival histories are compared for temporal priority, predicted venue order, source independence, coverage, mechanism coherence, exception burden, and negative cases."},{"archetype_element":"Best-so-far explanation or plurality state","domain_realization":"The reconstruction selects a working causal sequence only when it materially outperforms rivals; otherwise it preserves a ranked set or a compound explanation."},{"archetype_element":"Defeasibility status","domain_realization":"Any selected account is labeled provisional and research-limited, allowing archival inquiry but not unsupported motive attribution, blame, or definitive canon-history claims."},{"archetype_element":"Discriminating evidence plan","domain_realization":"A bounded archive, earlier period, venue, or comparison work is chosen where the leader and nearest rival predict different precursor or diffusion traces."},{"archetype_element":"Revision trigger and action–confidence boundary","domain_realization":"Corrected dates, inconsistent sampling, absent predicted precursors, contrary venue sequences, or stronger collection-bias evidence reopen the ranking and suspend dependent causal language."}],"title":"Reception Inflection Reconstruction for Rival Histories of Literary Reputation","version":0}