01 / Base condition
Capability
What can an AI system do?
Tasks, outputs, tool use, and performance are necessary—but do not determine how an inquiry is organized.
Integrating practice
Governed Cognition
AIDE’s approach to accountable human–AI inquiry: keep purpose, authority, evidence, constraints, and revision explicit enough for responsible judgment.
The central problem
Human–AI inquiry needs more than a capable answer.
An AI system can produce a fluent answer. That does not tell us whether the question is well framed, the relevant evidence is in view, or human judgment remains responsible for the decision.
Governed Cognition organizes an inquiry so that its purpose, authority, evidence, constraints, and revisions remain visible.
Practice in view
Three layers in an AI-supported inquiry.
Capability matters. AIDE also asks how a situation is represented and examined—and how people direct and review the work.
02 / Shared representation
Structured Reasoning
How is a situation represented and examined?
A shared structural field makes the represented situation available for inquiry rather than leaving it implicit in prompts and outputs.
03 / Encompassing practice
Governed Cognition
How do people direct and review the inquiry?
Purpose, authority, evidence, constraints, revision, durable knowledge, and observability remain active within the work.
Within Structured Reasoning, Structural Cognition Theory supplies the field model used to represent and examine a situation. Governed Cognition concerns the wider conditions that keep that inquiry directed, evidenced, reviewable, and answerable to human judgment.
The inquiry
How governed inquiry proceeds.
An inquiry becomes a continuing piece of work that people can examine and direct together. Its question, representation, evidence, constraints, and judgments are made visible enough to work with—not left dispersed across prompts, outputs, and individual memory.
Set the inquiry.
Establish the question, purpose, relevant participants, and the judgment or action the work is meant to support.
Build a shared representation.
Describe the situation as a field of relevant elements, relations, constraints, tensions, and unresolved conditions.
Examine what the work supports.
Distinguish evidence, interpretation, uncertainty, and possible paths so claims and assumptions can be challenged clearly.
Review and carry it forward.
Record what changed, what remains unresolved, and what requires a human judgment or next action.