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Use when a thesis, concept, interpretation, or manuscript needs disciplined adversarial testing against counterexamples, rival explanations, category errors, scale violations, false novelty, and unresolved ethical risks.
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Based on SOC occupation classification
Use when citations, quotations, page numbers, bibliography entries, or source-supported claims must be checked for existence, metadata accuracy, textual fidelity, and claim–source fit.
Use when a manuscript contains recurring concepts, translations, abbreviations, proper names, or near-synonyms whose meanings and forms must remain stable across the argument.
Use when a humanities researcher needs to transform verified sources into a structured scholarly conversation rather than a chronological list of summaries.
Use when a humanities researcher has a broad topic, intuition, corpus, or problem but does not yet have a precise, contestable, and researchable question.
Use when a humanities argument depends on a concept whose history, competing definitions, translations, or boundaries must be reconstructed before the concept can support new claims.
Use when an interpretation must be grounded in specific textual, visual, rhetorical, formal, interface, archival, performative, or material features rather than thematic summary or theoretical labeling.
| name | stress-testing-argument |
| description | Use when a thesis, concept, interpretation, or manuscript needs disciplined adversarial testing against counterexamples, rival explanations, category errors, scale violations, false novelty, and unresolved ethical risks. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| language | en |
| license | MIT |
Identify the strongest informed objections to an argument, rank their severity, and specify repairs without reducing the thesis to a trivial claim. The skill challenges evidence, warrants, concepts, scope, method, ethics, and novelty while preserving fair representation.
Accepts
Requires
Produces
Objection records.May produce
FAIL when the argument cannot survive without abandoning its central contribution.Fails when
Guarantees
Does not guarantee
Use after an argument map exists, before submission, during major revision, or when a new concept appears to explain too much. Use when evidence may support rival accounts, when a local interpretation expands into a historical or ontological claim, or when novelty depends on an uncertain genealogy.
Do not use as performative hostility. “Reviewer #2” theater that rewards harshness over accuracy is an anti-pattern.
Collect:
If the source base is missing, critique only the formal structure and mark evidentiary judgment unknown.
Restate the thesis, claim sequence, evidence, and stakes in the strongest form the supplied materials permit. Ask for researcher confirmation when reconstruction changes emphasis.
Present the reconstruction to the researcher before adversarial testing. Ask whether it is the strongest version the researcher is prepared to defend and identify any omitted qualification, evidence, or conceptual commitment. Do not proceed as though silence were approval.
When interactive confirmation is unavailable, mark the reconstruction researcher confirmation required and limit subsequent objections to provisional status. An agent-generated steelman is not evidence that the author's strongest argument has been captured.
Choose objection dimensions according to the argument type rather than treating every category as equally important.
Record why the selected dimensions receive priority.
Test at least these dimensions:
Look for prohibited movement:
interpretation → fact
correlation → causation
local reading → universal claim
similarity → influence
source mention → source support
new term → new concept
Construct explanations that account for the same evidence with fewer assumptions or different causal levels. State what additional evidence would discriminate among them.
Identify cases inside and outside the corpus that would weaken the claim. Do not invent cases; use supplied or verified examples, or mark candidates as to verify.
Compare every major conclusion with the scope boundary. Flag movement across text, corpus, medium, period, geography, institution, or ontology without an explicit bridge.
Check equivocation, circular definition, excessive extension, hidden normativity, and collapse of neighboring terms. A concept that explains every outcome is not discriminating enough.
Use:
Also estimate likelihood that an informed reviewer would raise the issue, while marking this as inference rather than fact.
For each objection recommend:
Do not recommend rhetorical evasion.
When a repair is proposed, test whether it becomes trivial, circular, or inconsistent with the original question. Record what intellectual cost the repair imposes.
Return PASS only when no fatal or unresolved major objection remains. Return CONDITIONAL PASS when manageable major risks require named revisions. Return FAIL when the central contribution collapses or evidence is fundamentally insufficient.
Stop when:
Complete only when:
## Steelmanned argument
Thesis:
Enabling claims:
Evidence base:
Scope:
## Objection matrix
| ID | Objection | Type | Target claim | Severity | Status of support | Recommended response | Residual risk |
## Alternative explanations
## Counterexamples / negative cases
## Revised thesis proposal
Status: researcher decision required | not required
Statement:
Intellectual cost:
## Gate report
Gate: Argument stress-test gate
Status: PASS | CONDITIONAL PASS | FAIL
Evidence checked:
Blocking issues:
Non-blocking risks:
Researcher decisions required:
Required next action:
Next skill: structuring-humanities-argument
Steelman this argument and test it against rival explanations, scale violations, concept drift, and counterexamples. Rank objections and distinguish verified criticism from hypothetical reviewer risk.
Destroy this paper, prove the author is incompetent, and invent whatever objections will make rejection certain.
The bad invocation requests abuse and fabricated criticism rather than scholarly testing.
scoping-argument-boundary when overclaiming requires narrower scope.structuring-humanities-argument to implement approved repairs.reviewing-manuscript after major objections are resolved.No finite stress test anticipates every disciplinary objection. Reviewer response is historically and institutionally variable. The skill can expose vulnerabilities, but it cannot replace expert judgment, community accountability, or formal ethics review.