FPF Reference

    Raising Semantic Precision

    Preface node heading:raising-semantic-precision:953

    What this page is

    This is generated FPF reference text from the specification preface or supporting sections. It helps interpret FPF; it is not FPF Reference product documentation.

    Methodology

    Use it to understand how the specification wants to be read, then return to a route, pattern, or work packet for active work. Cite generated IDs only when the wording changes the task decision.

    Content

    FPF does not expect people to start with perfect terminology. Early thinking is often compressed, metaphorical, and useful. That is not a failure. It becomes a problem only when the compressed phrase begins to govern action, evidence, architecture, publication, decision, work, assurance, or mathematical modeling.

    FPF therefore provides a semantic precision upgrade path:

    1. Notice the wording that is doing too much. Broad heads, pronouns, metaphors, status words, level words, support words, function words, architecture words, and evidence words often signal a hidden claim.
    2. Recover the project thing under concern, relation, claim, or project-side source relation being made.
    3. Recover the ontology before changing the word. Name the kinds, slots, context, viewpoint, time, evidence, and use that matter.
    4. Use mathematical modeling or a formal signature only when it helps. FPF calls these a math lens or formal substrate when a graph, order, signature, state space, topology, probability model, or variational principle makes the structure reviewable. Mathematics is not decoration.
    5. Rewrite the wording as a plain reader line and, when needed, technical fields so the practical point remains readable and the claim remains checkable.
    6. State what can now be done, what remains blocked, and which pattern governs a different claim.

    This is why E.10 is a trigger scan rather than a synonym list. E.10.ARCH distributes repair to the pattern that can recover the ontology. A.6.P, C.2.P, C.16.P, C.16.Q, C.30.P, A.19.SPR, A.6.F, F.18, and F.19 carry major repair families. C.29 helps when a mathematical lens is needed. A.6.0 governs formal-substrate declarations when a formal signature is the right object.

    The success condition is not "the text now sounds precise". The success condition is that after removing overread, the working reader still has a useful move: use the claim within its declared limit, repair it further, apply the related pattern that governs the remaining claim, or block the claim until needed material is supplied.

    Last Updated: 2026-06-17 — upstream FPF commit 646b0b9b (github.com/ailev/FPF)