The Working Repository as a Corrigible Interface for Comparative Enquiry Under Uncertainty

Finite participants encounter changing causal conditions from within them; exhaustive reconstruction is unavailable, but enquiry and participation continue. Viability Studies proposes a disciplined way to compare purpose-relative descriptions of relationships implicated in how systems persist, adapt, fail and reorganise under such uncertainty. For each proposed comparison, investigators would specify the phenomenon independently of Repository terminology, justify a provisional compression of causal history, identify boundary and scale, compare domain mechanisms, and retain counterexamples and failed translations. The Working Repository is the proposed public, corrigible record of these encounters, not a taxonomy whose candidate entries are presumed true. The Teabag Test poses the selection question: which omitted relationship could change a stated enquiry or participation, and what would reveal that omission? It supplies no universal sufficiency threshold. The paper’s proposed contribution is the joined comparative procedure and the public record that could make correspondences, divergences and errors cumulative and revisable. Its empirical wager is that disciplined comparison will yield consequential distinctions or questions beyond redescription within the source domains; both informative transfer and informative failure are possible results. This paper provides a conceptual rationale, a proposed record protocol and an author-generated example. It reports no completed specialist pilot, validated domain measures or implemented governance system. Specialist participation is needed to test the architecture and determine its value. Increased legibility, if achieved, does not ensure uptake or desirable outcomes.