• conforms_to::[[Gloss Form Contract]]
• authored_by::[[Deep Context Community]]
• has_lifecycle::[[Seed Stage]]
• has_curation::[[Working Draft]]
• in_practice_domain::[[Deep Context Architecture]]

Retrospective Observation

The epistemic status of an Observation whose claim rests on a record, reconstruction, or recalled account rather than on a direct measurement or experiment. A Retrospective Observation declares has_epistemic_status::[[Retrospective Observation]] and carries a Grounds section that names the record the claim rests on — a log, a meeting transcript, a git history, a session artifact — and acknowledges the limits of that record.

The retrospective framing is load-bearing. A record is always less complete than what it records. The author writing a Retrospective Observation is claiming something from the record, not from the original event, and the Grounds must name the distance between the two: what the record captured, what it probably missed, and how much weight the claim bears given those limits. Acknowledging the record's limits is not a caveat — it is part of the epistemic status itself, built into the form.

The four epistemic statuses — Empirical, Retrospective, [[On-Faith Observation]], [[Contested Observation]] — come from Classify Observations by Epistemic Status With Matched Grounds. Each pairs with a Grounds shape that matches the kind of evidence the status carries. Retrospective sits adjacent to Empirical (which uses direct measurement as its grounding), distinguished by the record-versus-measurement axis: direct observation produces Empirical grounds, record-of-observation produces Retrospective grounds, and the author's honesty about which kind they have is what the status signals.