Case 6 — Retrospective storytelling and the reason-provenance problem

Research setting

Reflection on the research process raised a practical concern: researchers can tell convincing stories after the event about why they made a decision.

A polished retrospective account may be sincere and useful while still being evidentially different from a contemporaneous record.

Consequential move

The researcher explicitly raised the problem of retrospective storytelling and asked how journals could distinguish among:

• ex-ante principles;
• recorded contemporaneous evidence;
• ex-post reasoning.

AI-assisted development then helped formalise the distinction. Later critical review narrowed it further by recognising that tacit or incompletely articulated judgement can still be genuine contribution.

Outcome

The conceptual work moved away from a simple “more logging is better” position.

Later versions distinguished evidence that a person or system changed the trajectory from evidence about why that change occurred. They also focused on whether evidence discriminates the alternative contribution histories relevant to a bounded claim.

Reason-provenance lesson

The evidential quality of an attribution claim depends not only on what was recorded but on when it was recorded and what the record can actually establish.

Evidence available to public readers

Readers can inspect the bounded reconstruction and its stated limits; the original full conversation and internal conceptual-development records are not reproduced in this repository.

Boundary

Retrospective reasoning is not worthless. It is a different evidential object from contemporaneous trace.

One conversational intervention also did not create the full framework. Literature, adversarial review and boundary cases materially changed the eventual theory.