Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Prescription
PartialNot claimedDefinition · Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Long usage itself confers authority: a practice that has organized life for generations carries compressed, tested wisdom, even when nobody can articulate its justification.
Analysis
Practice is treated as the criterion of correctness: CultureBank's descriptors are built from users' own self-narratives, and ValueScope reads norms off how community members actually write. That deference to what a community does is half of Burke's claim. Duration is the other half and it is nowhere, since nothing separates a practice of generations from a TikTok post of last month, and CulturePark's material has no usage behind it at all, being generated by agents inside a single simulation.
The unwritten constitution
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · A. V. Dicey, Law of the Constitution (1885)
Some of a country's most binding norms are never written anywhere — the UK's constitutional conventions bind governments without a single codified sentence. Binding and codified are different properties.
Analysis
ValueScope's subject is exactly norms nobody wrote down, recovered from linguistic and stylistic expression across 13 Reddit communities, and it reports that even closely related communities differ sharply. The recovery is where it parts from Dicey: a norm that existed only in practice ends as a score, a descriptor among some 23,000, or one of 3,307 taxonomized values. Dicey's point is that such norms bind without codification, and here they are codified in the act of being found, with nothing in the pipelines actually bound by them.
Organic amendment
PartialNot claimedDefinition · Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Norms change from within a community's practice — gradually, by adjustment — not by decree from outside. The community is the author of its own drift.
Analysis
ValueScope traces how community norms evolve and registers the emergence of new sub-communities, so drift inside practice is at least visible. The other change it names is the influence of a significant external event, the US presidential elections, which is change arriving from outside rather than a community adjusting its own practice. The other three artifacts are snapshots, and in none of the four can a community amend the record that now speaks for it.