Reflexive Development of Cognitive Memoisation: Dangling Cognates as a First-Class Cognitive Construct

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Title: UI Boundary Friction as a Constraint on Round-Trip Knowledge Engineering
Author: Ralph B. Holland
version: 0.1.0
Publication Date: 2025-12-22
Affiliation: Arising Technology Systems Pty Ltd
Contact: ralph.b.holland [at] gmail.com
Provenance: This is an authored paper maintained as a MediaWiki document; reasoning across sessions reflects editorial changes, not collaborative authorship.
Governance: MWDUMP (authoritative)
Method: Cognitive Memoisation (CM)
Status: Pre-release draft — first externalised capture

Metadata (Normative)

The metadata table immediately preceding this section is CM-defined and constitutes the authoritative provenance record for this MWDUMP artefact.

All fields in that table (including artefact, author, version, date, local timezone, and reason) MUST be treated as normative metadata.

The assisting system MUST NOT infer, normalise, reinterpret, duplicate, or rewrite these fields. If any field is missing, unclear, or later superseded, the change MUST be made explicitly by the human and recorded via version update, not inferred.

Curator Provenance and Licensing Notice

This document predates its open licensing.

As curator and author, I apply the Apache License, Version 2.0, at publication to permit reuse and implementation while preventing enclosure or patent capture. This licensing action does not revise, reinterpret, or supersede any normative content herein.

Authority remains explicitly human; no implementation, system, or platform may assert epistemic authority by virtue of this license.

Abstract

Cognitive Memoisation (CM) is a human-curated method for governing interaction with large language models (LLMs) under conditions of statelessness, interruption, and epistemic uncertainty. This paper introduces *dangling cognates* as a first-class cognitive construct within CM and demonstrates that CM itself is best understood as a collection of dangling cognates until resolved through round-trip cognitive engineering (RTKE).

Dangling cognates are unresolved but meaningful cognitive entities that can be carried for extended durations without requiring premature resolution. CM explicitly permits their existence, governs their use, and constrains their eventual settlement through externally governed CM-artefacts such as CMDUMP, MWDUMP and TMLDUMP.

The paper argues that RTKE and dangling cognates together explain how productive thinking, inference, hallucination control, and human curation can coexist without reliance on conversational continuity or retained model state. CM is shown to be reflexive: it was developed using the same mechanisms it defines.

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1. Introduction

Most formal reasoning systems assume that uncertainty is temporary and should be resolved as quickly as possible. Human reasoning, by contrast, often tolerates extended periods of unresolved meaning without discomfort.

This paper formalises that tolerance.

Cognitive Memoisation does not require ideas to be immediately true, false, or discarded. Instead, it permits unresolved cognitive entities—*dangling cognates*—to persist across time, sessions, and artefacts, until sufficient external grounding exists to resolve them.

Importantly, CM does not depend on conversational memory. Continuity is achieved only through explicit externalisation and governance. What survives that process is retained; everything else is intentionally lost.

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2. Dangling Cognates

A dangling cognate is a cognitive construct that is:

  • meaningful but unsettled
  • recognised but not resolved
  • carried intentionally without discomfort
  • governed, but not forced into closure

Dangling cognates are not errors. They are not hallucinations. They are not incomplete thoughts.

They are legitimate intermediate cognitive states.

Within CM, dangling cognates serve as placeholders for future settlement. They allow inference to proceed without collapsing uncertainty prematurely.

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3. Dangling Cognates and Inference

Allowing dangling cognates fundamentally alters how inference proceeds.

Traditional systems attempt to eliminate ambiguity early. CM delays resolution until external artefacts can govern the outcome.

This permits:

  • non-linear reasoning
  • deferred validation
  • safe speculative inference
  • controlled interaction with model hallucination

In CM, model hallucination is not treated as a failure mode by default. It is treated as a potential source of signal, subject to later adjudication.

Dangling cognates act as buffers: hallucinated or speculative content can exist without contaminating settled knowledge, because it is not permitted to govern future reasoning until explicitly externalised and validated.

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4. Round-Trip Cognitive Engineering (RTKE)

Round-trip cognitive engineering is the governing mechanism that resolves dangling cognates.

The RTKE cycle is:

1. Exploratory interaction produces provisional insight 2. Insight is externalised into an artefact 3. The artefact is governed, constrained, and serialised 4. The artefact is reintroduced as a boundary on future reasoning 5. Divergence between inference and artefact is exposed 6. A human curator adjudicates 7. The artefact is revised or the cognate is discarded

What cannot survive this round trip is not retained.

RTKE therefore converts dangling cognates into either:

  • settled invariants
  • revised hypotheses
  • or intentionally discarded content

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5. Reflexivity of Cognitive Memoisation

Cognitive Memoisation itself emerged as a collection of dangling cognates.

The method was not designed top-down. It was stabilised bottom-up through repeated RTKE cycles.

Every invariant in CM exists because it survived:

  • session loss
  • interruption
  • boundary enforcement
  • explicit externalisation
  • human adjudication

CM is therefore reflexive: it applies its own rules to itself. This distinguishes CM from methods that rely on implicit continuity or memory.

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6. Episodic Records and Bound Inference

CM permits episodic recording of interaction segments, but only as non- authoritative provenance.

Dialog fragments, session extracts, and exploratory turns may be preserved to support inference reconstruction, but they never govern reasoning directly.

Dangling cognates allow these episodic records to exist without forcing narrative continuity. Inference may jump across episodes, but authority remains external.

Bound inference occurs only when explicitly authorised by artefacts such as MWDUMP.

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7. Human Curation Without Assumption

Within CM, epistemic authority is assigned to the *curation role*, not to “humans” as a biological category.

This avoids assumptions about cognition while preserving responsibility.

The curator decides:

  • what is externalised
  • what is governed
  • what is revised
  • what is discarded

The LLM assists, but does not decide.

This separation allows hallucination, intuition, and inference to coexist without epistemic collapse.

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8. Implications

Dangling cognates explain how long-horizon thinking is possible under stateless interaction.

RTKE explains how that thinking can be made reliable.

Together, they form a disciplined framework for working with LLMs as cognitive instruments rather than memory stores.

CM does not eliminate uncertainty. It governs it.

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9. Conclusion

Cognitive Memoisation can be understood as a managed ecosystem of dangling cognates resolved through round-trip cognitive engineering.

This paper externalises that understanding as a governed artefact. What survives future round trips may govern further work. What does not is intentionally lost.

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References

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