The method is the how behind the Grammar of Meaning. It reads any text as a series of moves — the smallest things a text does with an idea — and codes both what a text says and what it pointedly doesn't. It is an instrument, published openly: the grammar, the coding tool, and the corpus, so others can extend, audit, and contest it. What you'll find here is the machinery, not a verdict — the reading is still ahead.
We read a text as a sequence of moves. A move is one operation performed on a substrate, producing an outcome — carried by its arguments: who acts, on what authority, at what scale, inside what larger frame, in what historical world. In Romans 8, God predestines the foreknown, and the result is conformity to the image of the Son: one move, with its parts. Coding a text this way — the positive grammar — turns a passage into something comparable across traditions, which is the precondition for asking whether two traditions rhyme.
We claim the protocol, not the discovery.
— Grammar of Meaning · on the method
The moment you can see the choices a text made, you can see the ones it didn't. If God predestined these, the shadow is not those. This is the negative space: at each part of a move, the roads not taken — and it is co-equal with the positive, two readings of one object. Most roads not taken are quietly fine to skip. What we count is narrower: an obligated absence, a road the text itself raised and then sealed. Paul says God predestined these and never says on what basis these and not those — the question is raised, the argument leans on it, and he seals it shut. That is the negative grammar: not free-floating, but derived from the positive, part by part.
And the shadow isn't guessed — it's read off the positive. Where a part of a move has a fixed set of options, the dough is the whole set; the move stamps one; the shadow is the rest. A deterministic engine generates those roads not taken; a coder then tags each on four axes — register, source, obligation, and weight — and marks which the text was actually obligated to answer. Generation is mechanical; obligation is interpretive; the line between them stays bright. What it produces is a candidate the method is built to test, not a finding — coding stands at zero.
Every move a text makes casts one it withheld.
— Grammar of Meaning · positive and negative grammar
The coding tool asks two measurable questions before any interpretation: is a move present? and is an absence obligated? Separating the two is what keeps the reading honest — it is the difference between a text being silent because it is about something else, and a text raising a question it declines to answer. The instrument produces coded moves and flagged absences; it does not produce meaning. It is the microscope, not the finding.
A solo researcher can't run a room of human coders, so a panel of independent model cohorts stands in for inter-rater reliability: the same coding question, put to multiple models and stances, reconciled into what they agree on and where they diverge. Two honest limits travel with every number. Reliability is not validity — agreement measures whether readers agree, not whether they are right. And because the coders are models, any agreement figure is a lower bound on the task's difficulty, not a warrant of truth. Alongside it runs bias-visibility: the corpus is cast wide and its skew is logged and shown, rather than pre-filtered away — a documented bias is more defensible than a hidden one.
The method sits in a line of open, cross-domain builders — Brand's access, Diderot's encyclopedic ambition, Alexander's patterns, Meadows's archetypes across fields, Smil's empirical breadth. What it adds is the how: it publishes the methodology, the corpus, and the tooling, so the reading can be extended, audited, and argued with rather than taken on trust. The open method is the contribution.
A rhyme is the same move made in a different voice.
— Grammar of Meaning · what the method is for
Every result here is a candidate the method is built to test, not a conclusion it has reached. The coding is the frontier — the next thing, not the done thing.
And the question that coding is built to answer is a rhyme: not whether traditions agree, but whether they make the same move underneath their different answers. A rhyme is the same move made in a different voice. That is the frontier — and this page will keep saying exactly that until it is crossed.
More walkthroughs will land here as the method opens up — each a card, not a rewrite of this page.