core/docs/curriculum/cognition_saturation_v2.md

Curriculum Unit — Cognition Pack Saturation v2

Date: 2026-05-18 Author: Shay Active corpus: 21 chains (was 14; +7 this unit). Lift: cognition lane metrics unchanged (already at architectural ceiling); saturation lift is in the live-prompt grounding surface — 7 new prompts that previously fell through to vault/disclosure now route to teaching-grounded surfaces deterministically.

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Premise

The first curriculum unit (epistemology_v1.md) targeted the corpus-fixable holdout misses. ADR-0060 and ADR-0061 closed the architectural holdout misses (correction template, procedure routing). After those three pieces, the cognition-lane public split is at 100/100/91.7/100 and holdout at 100/100/83.3/100 — both at the architectural ceiling of the current pack + surface composition.

The remaining 4/24 holdout term misses are concentrated on UNKNOWN-intent cases that need a distinct selector (out of scope for this unit).

This unit is not about lifting eval metrics. It's about saturating the cognition pack's chain coverage so that more of the pack's 78 lemmas have reviewed (subject, intent) cells to route through teaching-grounded surfaces. Lift is observable at the live-prompt level, not in the public/holdout eval splits (which test a fixed 13/19 cases).

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What this unit teaches

Seven new chains across three coherent clusters:

Cluster A — Cognition-source chains

The cognitive act produces meaning; questions produce understanding-gap exposure; recall produces awareness of memory.

Chain	Defensible claim
cause_thought_reveals_meaning	Thought is the cognitive act through which meaning emerges.
cause_question_reveals_understanding	Socratic: questions reveal where understanding is incomplete.
cause_recall_reveals_memory	Recall is the mechanism that brings memory into awareness.

Cluster B — Conceptual structure chains

Definitions ground concepts; concepts require definitions (bidirectional grounding).

Chain	Defensible claim
cause_definition_grounds_concept	To define X is to ground the concept X.
verification_concept_requires_definition	A concept must be definable to count as a concept.

Cluster C — Semantic-content chains

Meaning underlies understanding; analogies reveal relations.

Chain	Defensible claim
cause_meaning_grounds_understanding	Semantic content underlies understanding.
cause_analogy_reveals_relation	Analogies reveal hidden structural relations.

All seven are pack-consistent (subject and object both in en_core_cognition_v1), use canonical predicates (reveals, grounds, requires), and open previously-empty (subject, intent) cells.

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Lift profile

Cognition lane (fixed 13/19 cases)

Split	Pre-v2	Post-v2	Δ
public	100 / 100 / 91.7 / 100	100 / 100 / 91.7 / 100	byte-identical
holdout	100 / 100 / 83.3 / 100	100 / 100 / 83.3 / 100	byte-identical

No movement — expected. The 19 holdout cases don't include any of the subjects this unit teaches. Saturation isn't visible at the canonical-eval level.

Live-prompt lift

Seven prompts that previously fell through to the universal disclosure (or to a vault recall that may or may not return a coherent surface) now route to deterministic teaching-grounded surfaces:

Why does thought exist?            → [teaching] thought reveals meaning (...)
Why does a question exist?         → [teaching] question reveals understanding (...)
Why does definition exist?         → [teaching] definition grounds concept (...)
Why does meaning exist?            → [teaching] meaning grounds understanding (...)
Why does an analogy exist?         → [teaching] analogy reveals relation (...)
Does a concept require definition? → [teaching] concept requires definition (...)
Why does recall exist?             → [teaching] recall reveals memory (...)

Each emits a surface containing the subject, the humanised connective, the object, and the relevant pack semantic_domains strings — pack-grounded discipline preserved.

Why saturation matters even when eval numbers don't move

The eval splits test 32 fixed cases (13 public + 19 holdout). The cognition pack has 78 lemmas; pack-consistent (subject, intent) cells across {cause, verification} number in the hundreds. Today's 21 chains cover ~21 of those cells — roughly 12% saturation.

Without saturation, every prompt outside the 32 eval cases is a coin flip between vault recall (session-stateful, may return incoherent surface) and the universal disclosure (no grounding). Saturation moves the marginal prompt from "coin flip" to "deterministic teaching-grounded surface."

This is the foundation the composed-surface ADR will sit on: chain-of-chains composition only produces fluent surfaces when the constituent chains exist. v2 builds the constituent surface.

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Process notes — operator wall-time

Total operator wall-time for this unit, end-to-end:

• Candidate authoring (7 JSONL files): ~3 minutes (mostly typing).
• Proposals (7 × core teaching propose): ~13 seconds each — the replay gate runs the full cognition lane on each. ~90s total.
• Accepts (7 × core teaching review --accept): sub-second each.
• Eval + audit + lane regression check: ~45 seconds.

Total: ~5 minutes of operator wall-time for 7 reviewed chains. The replay-equivalence gate is the dominant cost. Worth the cost: every accepted chain has a CI-grade no-regression guarantee at the moment of admission.

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Cumulative corpus state

Phase	Chains active	Cumulative additions
Pre-curriculum (2026-05-18 morning)	10	—
After epistemology v1	14	+4 (1 supersede)
After cognition saturation v2	21	+7

Now-covered subjects: light, knowledge, memory, correction, creation, truth, wisdom, understanding, judgment, evidence, inference, thought, question, definition, meaning, analogy, concept, recall.

Pack-resident subjects still without any teaching chain (~60+ lemmas): account, answer, ask, beginning, belong, cause, compare, comparison, contrast, context, define, discourse, distinction, distinguish, explain, figure, follow, ground, identity, image, infer, learn, life, mean, metaphor, narrative, order, person, precede, principle, procedure, reason, register, relate, relation, remember, reveal, rhetoric, simile, spirit, story, style, support, symbol, teach, tone, verify, voice, word.

The next saturation pass could target a verb-noun balance (compare, contrast, distinguish, relate, explain, teach, learn) — useful for procedure-intent prompts after the ADR-0061 path landed.

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Cross-References

• Curriculum: epistemology v1 — the first unit; chain selection rationale and operator workflow.
• ADR-0057 — the propose/review/accept surface.
• ADR-0060
  • ADR-0061 — architectural surface composition fixes that close the remaining-fixable holdout misses.
• Next: composed-surface ADR (chain-of-chains realization) — the fluency surface that saturation v2 unlocks.