Required Consequence Table¶
A specification artifact — instantiates Contrapositive Elimination Reasoning
Lays out, for every candidate under consideration, the consequences it must produce if true — the mandatory footprints whose absence would rule it out.
Before you look at any evidence, Required Consequence Table fixes what you are looking for. It is a grid with one row per candidate and columns for the consequences each candidate is obligated to produce if it is the truth — the mandatory footprints. Its defining idea is prospective pre-commitment: by writing down, in advance, exactly what would have to be observed, it turns a later absence into a pre-agreed elimination instead of an after-the-fact rationalization. The table holds no logic and gathers no data; it is the specification the rest of the machinery runs against.
Example¶
A public-health team is investigating a cluster of gastrointestinal illness at a conference hotel. They build the table before the lab and epidemiology results arrive. Rows (the candidates): norovirus, Salmonella, a chemical/heavy-metal exposure, and a common-source water contamination. For each, they fill in only the mandatory consequences: norovirus must show a short incubation and rapid person-to-person spread; a heavy-metal exposure must show an abnormal metals panel in the sickest patients; a single common-source contamination must show cases clustered in time around one exposure rather than a propagating chain.
When results come back, the table does the cutting for them. The epidemic curve shows a long, propagating chain of cases — so the "single common-source" candidate, whose mandatory signature is a tight point-source cluster, is struck. Because the signature was committed before the data, nobody can accuse the team of moving the goalposts. The discipline echoes Koch's postulates, where a candidate pathogen must satisfy mandatory criteria before it can be named the cause.[1]
How it works¶
- Enumerate candidates as rows — the full antecedent set in contention, including the awkward ones a hunch would skip.
- Fill only necessary consequences — the test's whole rigor rests on the difference between "this candidate must produce X" and "this candidate usually produces X." Only must-produce cells can license an elimination; typical-but-not-mandatory observations are marked as suggestive and cannot cut.
- Prefer discriminating signatures — a consequence that only one candidate produces is worth more than one shared across several, because its presence or absence moves more of the field at once.
- Freeze before observing — the table is authored ahead of the evidence, so an absence found later is a pre-registered cut, not a story told after the fact.
Tuning parameters¶
- Necessity bar — how strictly a cell must qualify as "must produce." A high bar yields few columns, but every one is elimination-grade; a low bar yields a rich profile that cannot safely cut.
- Candidate breadth — how wide the row set runs. Including exotic candidates guards against a missed cause but costs effort and clutters the discriminating columns.
- Signature granularity — a single decisive marker per candidate versus a full multi-marker profile.
- Discrimination weighting — how hard to prioritize consequences unique to one candidate over shared ones.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is that pre-commitment starves confirmation bias: with the mandatory footprints fixed in advance, the elimination becomes auditable and the team cannot quietly redefine what "should" have been seen once they know which answer they want.
Its failure mode lives entirely in the "necessary" claims. Mislabel a typical consequence as mandatory and the table produces a false elimination — it strikes the true cause because, this once, the cause happened not to leave its usual mark. The classic misuse is filling the must-produce column with what you expect rather than what is genuinely obligatory, so an inconvenient candidate can be cut on a footprint it was never truly required to leave. The discipline is to demand a stated justification for each necessity claim and to demote any cell that has even one plausible exception to "suggestive."
How it implements the components¶
Required Consequence Table realizes the specification side of the archetype — what each candidate would have to produce:
antecedent_candidate_set— the rows: the enumerated candidates whose truth is in question.necessary_consequence_signature— the cells: the mandatory footprint each candidate must produce if it is the truth.forward_implication_record— each filled row is a recorded forward implication ("candidate ⟹ this consequence"), the raw material every downstream contrapositive move consumes.
It does not perform the deduction from an absence (contrapositive_inference_step — that's Modus Tollens Checklist); it does not verify that a footprint's absence is real and detectable (detectability_and_scope_check, absence_evidence_threshold — that's Negative-Evidence Reliability Review); and it does not track which candidates survive as evidence lands (residual_candidate_register — that's Elimination Decision Log).
Related¶
- Instantiates: Contrapositive Elimination Reasoning — the table supplies the mandatory-signature specification the whole appraisal eliminates against.
- Sibling mechanisms: Modus Tollens Checklist · Rule-to-Observation Matrix · Negative-Evidence Reliability Review · Falsification Test Harness · Diagnostic Rule-Out Protocol · Elimination Decision Log
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Representation, Specification & Plan
Rationale: Required Consequence Table operates as a static representation, map, specification, schema, or prospective plan that externalizes information because it lays out, for every candidate under consideration, the consequences it must produce if true — the mandatory footprints whose absence would rule it out.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Required Consequence Table as 'Lays out, for every candidate under consideration, the consequences it must produce if true — the mandatory footprints whose absence would rule it out', so its operative form is Representation, Specification & Plan.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; high confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Philosophy
Origin pattern: Convergent development
Present-day reach: Universal
Rationale: Deriving necessary observable consequences from rival claims is rooted in logic and philosophy of science.
Related originating lineages:
- Statistics & Experimental Design — Severe hypothesis tests and discriminating experimental predictions materially operationalized the table.
Review resolution: Both blind reviewers agree that philosophy is the primary historical origin. Explicit reconciliation of alternate origin disagreement, origin mode disagreement, domain reach disagreement adopts reviewer_a's evidence: Deriving necessary observable consequences from rival claims is rooted in logic and philosophy of science. The selected record uses alternates=statistics_experimental_design, origin_mode=convergent, and domain_reach=universal; the other review proposed alternates=mathematics, origin_mode=single_lineage, and domain_reach=multi_domain. The selected combination better preserves the mechanism-specific formative lineages and calibrated scope; broader present-day use is not treated as proof of additional historical origin.
Encyclopedia synthesis: The exact catalogued form synthesizes established practice rather than reproducing a single standard historical label.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
Notes¶
The table is the normative half of a pair: it says what must be seen, in the abstract and before observation. Its natural partner, Rule-to-Observation Matrix, is the empirical half — it crosses those required signatures against the observations actually gathered. Keeping specification separate from execution is what lets a team fix a bad "necessary" claim without re-running the whole investigation.
References¶
[1] Evans, Alfred S. "Causation and Disease: The Henle-Koch Postulates Revisited". Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 49(2): 175–195 (1976). Reviews the Henle–Koch postulates as criteria for evaluating whether a candidate infectious agent is causally related to a disease. registry ↩