Draw on established methods of each discipline rather than inventing ad hoc practices.
What this means
Every discipline has accumulated methods — ways of gathering evidence, structuring arguments, validating claims, and organizing knowledge. These methods were developed by practitioners over decades or centuries. When the emsemioverse works within a discipline, it should adopt that discipline’s methods rather than improvising.
This means:
- Research before building. Before encoding a discipline’s structure, survey how practitioners in that field organize their knowledge, what methodological commitments they hold, and what standards they use.
- Cite sources. Grounding in discipline practice requires citing
the sources that inform the practice. Use
[@citekey]references and maintain the bibliography. - Encode methods explicitly. Each discipline’s methods should be documented as methods within that discipline — not as informal knowledge in an agent’s context window. Methods are first-class content: they can be terms, concepts, curricula, or skills.
- Respect methodological differences. Mathematics proves. Sociology observes and theorizes. Philosophy argues. Ecology measures and models. These are not interchangeable. Do not apply mathematical proof standards to sociological claims, or sociological observation standards to mathematical objects.
Operational implications
- When starting work in a discipline, check: do we have documented methods for this discipline? If not, the first task is research, not content creation.
- Methods should be encoded at the discipline or school level:
discipline/disciplines/school/methods/or similar. - External research is not optional. Every discipline module should cite foundational methodological texts.
- When our practice conflicts with established discipline practice, document why (as a decision record), don’t silently diverge.
- The research cadence for any domain is: external research → encode as concepts/terms → compose into texts → develop curricula → implement as skills → assist with scripts → verify formally where possible.