A.19.CPM:2 - Problem
Engineering teams frequently need to compare two options (designs, methods, vendors, trajectories, hypotheses, etc.) across multiple measures and under incomplete evidence. Without a canonical comparison mechanism, teams predictably fall into one or more of these failure modes:
- Hidden scalarization: forcing a single number (or a single winner) from multi‑criteria reality, erasing incomparability and ties.
- Silent totalization: inventing an implied total order by convenience tie‑breakers or implicit thresholds, even when only a partial order is warranted.
- Inadmissible arithmetic: comparing across measures using operations that are not scale-admissible (CSLC‑violating) or not admitted by the declared admissibility frame.
- Comparator drift: “the comparator” exists only as prose or code intuition; different teams compare the same option set and measure set differently because the comparator spec is not explicit and edition‑pinned.
- Unknown coercion: missing or unknown evidence is coerced into an outcome (e.g.,
missing = equal), producing comparisons that look decisive but are epistemically unsafe. - Comparison-boundary drift: the same result label is reused after the profile pair, comparator, A.19 predicate, claim scope, selected context slices, reference plane, or evaluation window changed.
- Cross-scheme or cross-plane leakage: a comparison relies on a semantic relation between two exact F.17
SchemeSenseCellvalues without an obtaining F.9Bridgeand its separate bounded-use claim, or crosses exact ReferencePlanes without the applicable plane relation and policy. The relation or policy needed by the comparison is then unrecoverable.
CPM exists to make comparison explicit, admissibility-gated, set-valued, and replayable, so downstream selection can remain a separate policy-bound step.