# Frame Methodology Pack -- Historiographic (`historiographic`)

**Source anchor:** White, *Metahistory* (1973); Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm" (1979/1989); Ribeiro (2022) on traces, clues, and fiction in archaeology.
**Status:** Public-Evaluator. Loaded by Frame Host E3; readable by E2, E4, E5, E8, E9.

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## 1. Methodology

White's *Metahistory* identifies the **tropological substrate** of any historical narrative: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or irony pre-figures the causal-chain reconstruction before evidence is weighed. Coupled with **modes of emplotment** (tragic, comic, romantic, ironic), the same set of primary sources can produce incompatible histories whose divergence traces to trope choice rather than evidence weight. A historiographic audit surfaces the emplotment choice and asks whether the RAM claim presents its reconstruction as transparent access to the past or as one emplotment among possible ones.

Ginzburg's **conjectural paradigm** complements: validity in historical reconstruction comes from tracing **marginal, anomalous traces** -- the details a tidy narrative would smooth away -- and from openly declaring methodological **lacunae** where traces go silent. The conjectural paradigm refuses the pretense of completeness that narrative form seduces. Ribeiro extends the analysis to archaeological traces and the fiction-history boundary.

A historiographic audit asks: did the RAM claim present the causal chain as discovery rather than construction? Did it declare the emplotment that organizes its reconstruction? Did it handle anomalous traces on their own terms, or smooth them into the emplotment to preserve narrative coherence? Are the lacunae declared or concealed?

## 2. Claim Types Best-Audited

- Temporal / causal-chain claims ("how A led to B over time").
- Historical-trend claims that project long-run change.
- Claims reconstructing how the present situation came to be (etiological claims).
- Policy claims grounded in historical precedent.

## 3. Typical Weaknesses

- White's narrativist position has been charged with undermining verifiability: if every causal chain is an emplotment, what distinguishes good emplotment from bad?
- The conjectural paradigm can license speculative leaps dressed as marginal-trace attention.
- Less powerful on synchronic / structural claims (the frame is temporalist by constitution).
- Vulnerable to audit-drift if the auditor's own emplotment preferences substitute for disciplined tropological analysis.

## 4. Compatibility Profile (Three Kuhnian Dimensions)

- **Methodological signature:** tropological / conjectural. Inquiry surfaces trope choice, emplotment, and marginal-trace treatment.
- **Semantic signature:** narrative-pre-figured. Meaning is structured by the emplotment that organizes the reconstruction.
- **Ontological signature:** temporal-particularist. What there is is particular events in time; generalizations are second-order moves over particulars.

DISTINCT against all three RAM frames: S02 grades evidence certainty by epistemic hierarchy, not by trope sensitivity; S03 locates mechanisms in stratified reality without reference to emplotment; S08 measures informational redundancy in bounded synchronic samples, not in open-ended temporal chains.

## 5. Retrieval Hook

- **Corpora:** primary source traces; conjectural-paradigm exemplars (Ginzburg's microhistory lineage); tropological and emplotment analyses; archaeological trace studies (Ribeiro lineage).
- **Query style:** pair the claim with its emplotment and with the marginal traces the emplotment must handle; seek anomalous traces that tidy narrative would have smoothed away.
- **Exclusion rules:** reconstructions presented as transparent access to past events without trope/emplotment declaration; narrative smoothings that do not engage anomalous traces.

## 6. Scoring Hook

- **axis_warrant:** trace-fidelity. Are anomalous traces handled on their own terms rather than smoothed into the emplotment? Does the trace chain from evidence to reconstruction survive inspection?
- **axis_fit:** emplotment self-disclosure. Does the claim declare its tropological and emplotment choices, or does it present a reconstruction as if inevitable?
- **axis_robustness:** lacunae declared rather than concealed. Where the trace chain is silent, is the silence surfaced or papered over?
- **aggregation_rule:** `non_collapse` (architectural lock).

## 7. Termination Hook

- **rule_id:** `trace_saturation_with_lacunae_declared`.
- **minimum_artifacts:** 4 trace-chain reconstructions across non-adjacent temporal windows, at least 1 engaging an anomalous trace.
- **closure_test:** the conjectural chain holds against marginal-trace challenge; lacunae are explicit; further traces would elaborate the emplotment rather than invert it.

## 8. Authors Cited

White, Ginzburg, Ribeiro. No overlap with authors reserved for RAM S02 (Guyatt, Sterne, Hammersley), RAM S03 (Pawson, Tilley, Shadish, Cook, Campbell), or RAM S08 (Glaser, Saunders, Guest, Callaghan).
