Reconstructing Generative Structure from Relational Trajectories: A Conformance Specification for the Study of Systems That Generate Their Own Units

In a class of research objects the unit of analysis is produced by the process under study, and existing method treats the stability of that unit as a precondition to be checked rather than as an object to be modelled. Claims about change in such objects are therefore in part artefacts of the analyst's choice of unit, and no prevailing reporting norm requires anyone to say so. This working draft offers one specification, not a method, for research on such objects. Three declarations are identified that no current standard requires: how the unit under comparison came to exist, how a variable at one scale is produced by and constrains another, and what an account of a process forbids. A formal presentation is then given in which a trajectory becomes analysable only under a declared partition of the state space; the grammar is stratified into epochs within which the production set is held fixed, with rewriting of the production set confined to epoch boundaries; non-terminals carry a scale index, so that the crossing of scales becomes a syntactic property open to audit; and the presentation is probabilistic, which is what makes model comparison well defined where only positive evidence exists. Three propositions follow. Membership is decidable within an epoch and undecidable if rewriting is permitted mid-derivation, which is why stratification is forced rather than stylistic. Acceptance under one partition entails nothing under a partition that does not refine it. A grammar containing no scale-crossing production derives no observation from a macro-level start symbol, so a claim to connect scales is checkable on the production set alone. Each proposition is accompanied by a sketch of its own defeat, and two of the three are defeated in restricted settings by constructions given here; what survives in each case is a requirement rather than a theorem. The specification states eight declarations that any implementation owes its reader, graded into requirements and recommendations, and fixes which choices it leaves to the implementation. It is illustrated on two trajectories. What the specification excludes, the conditions under which each of its claims would fail, and a proposed test using simulated multi-agent societies for which the generating rules are known, are stated at the end.