What forms lines of reasoning, and how
What this part is for. Part 1 showed the two ingredients; Part 3 showed the smallest possible pairing of them. This part asks the question that actually matters for doing a study: how do you get from one isolated listener-and-doer pair to something that deserves to be called an argument — a chain of steps that builds on what came before, branches into several questions and reconverges, or reaches down into a delegated sub-investigation and carries its answer back out? Nothing new is invented to make this possible. A line of reasoning is what you get when the same two ingredients are wired so that one step's output is the very thing a later step was waiting for.
The one-sentence version: a line of reasoning is nothing but a chain of knot-and-bind pairs, each one's readiness naming exactly what the next one is waiting for — and the one mechanism that lets a finding cross any boundary along that chain, a Cell's wall or a whole session's, without ever being retyped, is called represent.
- 012.1 OverviewHow a chain forms at all, in plain words, with a real seven-step chain as the illustration.
- 022.2 Analytical RationaleDecomposition, barriers, and citation without re-derivation, in ordinary research-method terms.
- 032.3 Functional SpecificationThe three rails that govern a line of reasoning's shape, and the machine's own vocabulary for them.
- 042.4 Technical ImplementationThe actual code that declares a return socket, carries a finding across a boundary, and tracks a chain across sessions.