Captured Judgment
Captured judgment is the durable, inspectable, reusable artifact form of expert reasoning under uncertainty — including standards applied, alternatives rejected, evidentiary basis, and correction trail. It is the substrate that makes reviewable memory non-trivial under audit.
Definition
Captured judgment is the durable, inspectable, reusable artifact form of expert reasoning under uncertainty — including the standards being applied, the tradeoffs being weighed, the alternatives that were considered and rejected, the evidentiary basis, the decision, the post-decision state, and any correction trail. It is not a transcript, a prompt, or an SOP. It is closer to a court opinion than to a procedure manual.
The seven load-bearing elements
The structure is deliberate. Each element is preserved because removing it would lose the principle, the conditions, or the correction trail:
- The standard being applied — explicit, named, separable from any single application.
- The specific situation — including the conditions that mattered and the conditions that did not.
- The alternatives considered — what else was on the table, and why it was rejected.
- The evidentiary basis — source-anchored, inferred, and admittedly uncertain components named separately.
- The decision — what was done, with the reasoning visibly attached.
- The post-decision state — what happened next, including whether the decision turned out to have been right.
- The correction trail (if any) — the failure diagnosis and the revised standard, with the prior reasoning preserved rather than overwritten.
What it is not
- Not documentation. Documentation tells you what to do; captured judgment tells you how to decide what to do when the documentation does not fit.
- Not a prompt. Prompts compress an operator's pattern into instructions; the operator's reasoning is invisible. Captured judgment preserves the reasoning.
- Not a polished case study. Polished case studies remove the messy parts; the messy parts are where judgment showed up.
- Not a recorded interview. An interview captures what was said; captured judgment captures what would have caused the decision to be different.
Where the term sits
The longer treatment of captured judgment — what fills the seven elements, how it scales as an asset class, and why it is the substrate under reviewable memory — is on captured judgment. The architectural condition reviewable memory belongs to is governable AI action under human authority; its glossary entry is at governable AI action under human authority.
FAQ
- How does captured judgment differ from documentation?
- Documentation encodes processes and policies. Captured judgment encodes the reasoning that produced a specific decision under uncertainty — the alternatives considered, the evidence, the correction trail if any. Documentation answers what to do; captured judgment answers how to decide what to do when the documentation does not fit.
- How does captured judgment relate to reviewable memory?
- Reviewable memory is a system property — the commitment that what the system remembers is inspectable as a contract surface. Captured judgment is the artifact form that fills that contract surface with reasoning a reviewer can actually defend.