Three Kinds of Claim

Week 1 — before you can read a decision, you need to sort what a document proves

The whole course is this move

Reading an agenda, an invitation list, a silence, a set of minutes — every later week is this same distinction, applied to a different document.

  • Fact — a dated document states it directly
  • Inference — a reasonable reading, one step removed
  • Unknown — the record does not settle it either way

Not the same move

“The document is dated 3 March” is a fact.

“The document being dated 3 March proves the decision was already made” is an inference — a different sentence, doing more work than the first one.

Confusing the two is the single most common mistake this course marks against.

Unknown is not a failure

Saying “the public record does not show this” is itself a finding.

It is not the same as saying “I could not be bothered to find out.”

The seam

Between 1 March (open framing) and 3 March (settled framing), something changed.

Inference, not fact: no document names who, or why.

An equally reasonable alternative: the question may have been genuinely settled earlier, off the record, for good reasons — not concealed.

What this course is not claiming

Not: every meeting is theatre, and every private conversation before it is manipulation.

Pre-meeting coordination can make a room better informed. It can also exclude people who should have had a say. The public record often cannot tell you which happened — only what it can and cannot show.

A primary source records what a particular document or participant states happened. It does not itself guarantee the record is complete or true, it rarely tells you why, and it never tells you who else was in the room but not on the page.

A working description this course holds itself to, not a citation

Exercise debrief

Where did pairs disagree? Almost always on 2021-02-10 and 2021-02-24 — the document is a fact, the conclusion people draw from it is the inference, and the two get written as one sentence more often than not.

Before Week 2

Bring your classified timeline.

Next week: who was invited to the meeting this timeline ends at — and who wasn’t.