A thinking tool stays a thinking tool

What this answers: when does a page tell you how to decide, and when does it tell you what is correct? They are different jobs and one page cannot do both.

Status: proposed · Owner: Head of Design · Scope: Aleris Group · Version: v0.1 · Updated: 2026-08-25

Author: Claude (drafted, marked below) · Audience: everyone authoring in the core, plus the assistant

Supersedes: — · Related: [[group-scope]], principles/constant-and-contextual.md, documentation/how-decisions-are-recorded.md

1. Guiding material and specifications are different pages

Rule sentence and Implication drafted by Claude, 2026-08-25. Both argue, so both are Torfinn's to rewrite or reject. Everything below § 1 is measurement and utility text.

Guiding material teaches someone to decide a case the corpus has not met. A specification states what is correct in a case it has. A page does one or the other.

A guiding page in the durable core never acquires an enumerated set — of factors, axes, contexts, or constants — that applies everywhere. Enumerations belong to instances that declare their own reach: a domain, a branch, a medium, a market.

Implication. When a guiding page acquires a global list, both jobs get worse. The list answers the cases someone thought of and goes quiet on the rest, and the reasoning it replaced is no longer there for the cases it missed. The person facing something new is left with a lookup that does not contain their case and no instruction on how to think about it — which is the one thing the page existed to give them.

The reverse move is legitimate and should stay easy: a branch or a domain enumerating its own factors, saying which pages it binds, is the system working. Two such instances are accepted and shipping.

Detection of violation

Checked by reading, not by a script.

The signal: a page in constitutional/, principles/, or the Foundation reasoning tools (constant-contextual.md, emotional-modes.md) that states a closed set — "the four axes", "the five factors", "the constants are" — without naming a scope narrower than the corpus. A list on such a page that does not say where it stops is a breach.

The check has been run once, retrospectively, and it separates cleanly. Five attempts to give principles/constant-and-contextual.md structure, 2026-05-31 to 2026-08-25:

Attempt	Date	Scope	Outcome
Four contextual axes — channel/format, reader state, audience, market/culture	2026-05-31	global	Never confirmed; still open as card 54
Enumerate the constants, contextual as the residual	2026-08-24	global	Declined
Five context factors, each element declaring which bind it	2026-08-25	global	Withdrawn the same day
The physical domain's four factors — kliniktyp, patientgrupp, byggnadens förutsättningar, land och lokala krav	2026-08-06	one domain	Accepted, named as "the physical domain's instance of `principles/constant-and-contextual.md`"
Baseline's two surface modes — communicative and instrumental	before 2026-06	one branch	Accepted and shipping; `BASELINE.md` § Surface temperature opens "Baseline applies F6…"

Three at global scope refused, two at local scope accepted without argument. The split is by scope, not by outcome, which is why a rule that forbade lists outright would be wrong.

The physical instance is why a global list would have been wrong rather than merely unnecessary. Its four factors overlap the four axes on two — patientgrupp is audience-shaped, land is market-shaped — and diverge on two no global list would carry: kliniktyp and byggnadens förutsättningar. A building's constraints decide an interior and mean nothing for a screen. A list large enough to hold them is useless; one small enough to be useful excludes the factor that reorganised that domain's guide.

Known limit. Nothing detects the subtler version: a guiding page that keeps its prose but is read as a checklist because a downstream page treats it as one. principles/colour.md and principles/iconography.md did a version of this by borrowing a branch's vocabulary — found by grep in August 2026 and fixed under board card 76, not by any check.

Origin

Harvest provenance. Not reasoned from first principles. Read off the corpus's own record after the same proposal arrived a third time in four months and was withdrawn within a day of being taken. The measurement is in board card 79 and workspace/decisions/decision-record-context-factors-and-emotional-modes-2026-08-25.md § "What F6's position actually is": the corpus had settled this in practice and had never written it down, which is why the proposal kept arriving. This rule exists so that the fourth one meets something.

The same reasoning retired F8 Expression Calibration from the core on 2026-08-25. Its stated deliverable was "decision inputs: what determines where a context sits on the spectrum?" — a global list of factors on a core page, which is the shape this rule forbids. documentation/site-map.md records the removal; the digital instance in BASELINE.md § Surface temperature was enough, and the physical domain has its own.

External lineage. documentation/site-map.md § "The core as a reasoning system" — "the core is not just reference — it is a set of thinking tools that let people make good brand decisions in situations the manual never named (the productivity mechanism: questions generalise where answers don't)." This rule is that sentence made enforceable.

Open

The rule sentence and Implication are Claude-drafted and need Torfinn's wording before this moves to accepted.
Whether principles/ is inside the rule's scope or only constitutional/ and the Foundation reasoning tools. Drafted as inside; principles/ holds one real file today, so it has not been tested.
Board card 54 stays open on its own terms: rejecting the four-axis model is a consequence of this rule but is still a decision someone has to take on the page.

principles/constant-and-contextual.md — the page this rule protects, unchanged and to stay unchanged
documentation/how-decisions-are-recorded.md §3 — what a decision records instead of a list
[[group-scope]] — the other rule about what may and may not be built elsewhere