Metaphorum 2026 · Emerging Methods and Tools, and Contemporary Practice

From Evidence to Inquiry: Keeping LLM Inference Provisional in Recursive VSM Diagnosis

Purpose: Clemson’s VSM ToolBox and Pérez Ríos’s VSMod showed how software can support Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM); LLMs introduce a different cybernetic problem: plausible inference can harden into organisational fact and propagate across recursion levels. This project builds a traceable path from evidence to hypotheses, questions and candidate interventions. Methods: The prototype was applied to two public-record cases: Robin Hood Energy and the Charity Commission inquiry into New Wineskins Charitable Trust and U-Turn Move on Homes. It proposes operations, relations and recursive structure, promoting each only when an evidence-gated test passes; otherwise it abstains. Structural gaps become an agenda of focused questions; answers and corrections persist through reanalysis. Testable structural hypotheses and candidate prescriptions each carry a check that could confirm or refute them. When an LLM-attributed record includes a quotation and citations, the quotation must match the cited source text verbatim. Findings: Both demonstrations produced evidence-linked maps, diagnostic observations and explicit gaps. In one, an entered answer that no role monitored the external environment or future was retained verbatim as evidence of a System 4 gap; no function was invented to fill it. VSM operates as a reasoning grammar, not only a diagram. Implications/Contributions: The contribution is a persistent evidence-to-inquiry loop that turns abstention into diagnostic work while model suggestions remain provisional. Results demonstrate software traceability, not diagnostic validity or organisational impact. Practitioner testing comes next. When should AI-proposed structure become a diagnostic premise? Speaker: Richard Gunther — Recursive Systems

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