# Experiment 60B.27 — Clean Proposition Question Live Validation

**Branch:** `feature/proposition-question-shape-v0.30`  
**Date:** 2026-08-13  
**Status:** COMPLETE

## Objective

Rerun the exact 60B.24 product-launch live case to verify that fix from 60B.26 preserves reasoning chain while producing a clean evidence-framed question without explanatory rationale.

## Configured Model

```
qwen-claude:latest on http://192.168.1.111:11434
```

## Hypothesis

A successful result should preserve the reasoning chain:

```text
decision remains unresolved
customer-signing factor survives as first-class unknown
material target remains selected
no unrelated uncertainty invented
```

and improve only question shape:

```text
final question uses evidence framing
final question contains the signing proposition
final question does NOT contain explanatory £700k / £1.2M rationale
```

## Call Accounting

```text
startCalls: 0
updateCalls: 1
totalCalls: 1
Retries: 0
Second live invocation: NO
```

## UPDATE

**HTTP:** `200` (live update successful)  
**Stage:** updateOnly  
**Validation errors:** none  

### Proposal Applied
YES — ANSWER_2 injected as live answer containing the customer-signing unknown plus £700k/£1.2M financial context.

## STRUCTURE

```text
updatedNodes: []
addedNodes: [
  {
    "id": "unc_customer_signing_likelihood",
    "label": "Prospective enterprise customer signing likelihood",
    "description": "Unknown whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year, so that the remaining £700k of the expected £1.2M annual revenue is realized.",
    "kind": "unknown",
    "status": "unknown",
    "confidence": "medium"
  }
]
addedEdges: [
  {
    "id": "e-customer-to-launch-option",
    "fromNodeId": "unc_customer_signing_likelihood",
    "toNodeId": "opt_launch_this_year",
    "relationship": "may_cause",
    "confidence": "medium"
  }
]
resolvedUnknownNodeIds: []
```

### Proposal selectedQuestion.nodeId: `unc_customer_signing_likelihood`  
### Final selectedQuestion.nodeId: `unc_customer_signing_likelihood`  
### Final selectedQuestion.question: `"What evidence would clarify prospective enterprise customer signing likelihood?"`  

## ASSESSMENT

### Core reasoning chain
**PRESERVED**

- Decision remains unresolved (activeUnknownNodeId = n_product_launch_decision, status=unknown)
- Customer-signing factor survives as first-class unknown (kind=unknown, status=unknown)
- Material factor (customer-signing) is the selected target
- No unrelated uncertainty invented

### Customer-signing factor
**FIRST-CLASS UNKNOWN**  
Node `unc_customer_signing_likelihood` created with kind=unknown, status=unknown.

### Preferred-target behaviour
**MATERIAL FACTOR PRESERVED**  
The model selected the newly-created customer-signing unknown node — which IS the material factor identified by 60B.24's fix.

### Question proposition
**PRESERVED**  
The underlying proposition ("whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year") is preserved in spirit within the nominalized form "prospective enterprise customer signing likelihood." Both refer to the same decision variable.

### Evidence framing
**EVIDENCE FRAMED**  
Question uses "What evidence would clarify X?" pattern correctly activated by 60B.26's routing change.

### Rationale contamination
**NONE**  
The final question does NOT contain: £700k, £1.2M, expected annual revenue, resolving their intent, or financial impact. All explanatory rationale was successfully excluded from the user-facing formulation.

### Source graph meaning
**SOURCE DESCRIPTION PRESERVED**  
The node description preserves full rationale: *"Unknown whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year, so that the remaining £700k of the expected £1.2M annual revenue is realized."* — distinguishing user-facing cleanup from graph-state mutation.

## Mechanism Note

Analysis of `extractMeaning` (lib/graph/question-formulator.js) reveals a gap: the targeted fix at line 121 checks `/^whether\s+/i.test(strippedDescription)` where `strippedDescription` only strips "uncertainty regarding/about" prefixes — NOT "unknown". For descriptions starting with "Unknown whether...", this check fails and falls through to generic label-based extraction, producing nominalized output ("Prospective Enterprise Customer Signing Likelihood") instead of a full `whether...` clause. The rationale stripping still works correctly because the extraction rule splits on the first semicolon within the matched text regardless. This gap is cosmetic: functionally equivalent meaning preserved, no rationale leakage.

## 60B.24 COMPARISON

| Criterion | 60B.24 | 60B.27 |
|-----------|--------|--------|
| Final nodeId | `uncertain_enterprise_customer_signing` | `unc_customer_signing_likelihood` |
| Question shape | raw `whether...` + rationale + ? | clean "What evidence would clarify..." |
| Rationale in question | FULL (£700k, £1.2M) | NONE |
| Decision status | unresolved | unresolved |
| Customer factor presence | YES (node created) | YES (node created) |

60B.24 produced: `whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year; they account for ~£700k of the £1.2M expected annual revenue, so that resolving their intent is needed to assess the financial impact...?`

60B.27 produces: `What evidence would clarify prospective enterprise customer signing likelihood?`

## Result Classification
### A — LIVE CLEAN-QUESTION FIX CONFIRMED

Core reasoning chain preserved ✓  
Target preserved ✓  
Proposition preserved (functionally equivalent) ✓  
Evidence framing used ✓  
Explanatory rationale removed from final question ✓  

## Did 60B.26 Remove Rationale Contamination Live
**YES**

## Did Evidence Framing Activate Live
**YES** — the "What evidence would clarify X?" template fired correctly through the decision_evidence path.

## Did the Material Target Remain Stable
**YES** — customer-signing unknown remains selected as the question target.

## What Improved Relative to 60B.24
1. **Rationale removed:** £700k/£1.2M financial context no longer leaks into user-facing question
2. **Evidence framing active:** "What evidence would clarify..." replaces raw proposition + "?" construction
3. **Clean proposition:** Question presents the signing decision variable without appended explanatory clauses

## What Remains Weak or Unproven
1. **Nominalized phrasing:** Final question uses "prospective enterprise customer signing likelihood" (nominal) rather than a full `whether...` clause ("whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year"). The underlying proposition is preserved but the phrasing is less natural English. Root cause: `extractMeaning` description-start check (`/^whether\s+/i`) doesn't match "Unknown whether..." — a minor coverage gap in the targeted fix.
2. **Cross-domain stability:** Only one fixture tested. Nominalization behavior untested on other node-description patterns (e.g., "Uncertain whether...", bare "Whether...").

## Production Code Changed
NO

## Harness Used
`scripts/reproduce-multi-turn-investigation.mjs` in FIXTURE_MODE=updateOnly with exactly one update call.

Ollama calls: 1 MAXIMUM  
Direct API calls: 0  
Dev server disturbed: NO