Objectives
- Tag every starting fact with its evidence state
- Identify which assumptions are load-bearing
Video
Lesson
Every investigator arrives carrying something. The baseline stage puts it on paper, where it can be examined. An assumption held silently behaves exactly like a fact: it filters what you notice, and it never has to defend itself.
Take the starting material and tag each item. Observed: measured or witnessed, and you can produce the record. Corroborated: independently supported. Inferred: derived from evidence. Hypothesized: plausible and unconfirmed. Unknown: the evidence is insufficient, which is a finding and not a failure.
Then list the assumptions separately and mark the load-bearing ones — the assumptions that, if wrong, collapse the case. Those are the ones to attack first, while attacking them is still cheap.
This stage has a name because of what happens without it.
The worked presumption case walks the 2005 review: a prior belief hardened into a presumption and inverted the burden of proof.
Nobody in that chain thought they were assuming anything. That is the point.