The standard in full
CSTP does not invent criteria. It applies existing ones uniformly. That is the whole idea: a position should not get easier or harder treatment because of what it claims about reality.
Each level states what a position has and what it still lacks. That phrasing is deliberate. A level is not a grade awarded; it is a description of a record, and the thing it lacks is the next test someone could run.
Levels are cumulative. A position's standing is the highest level it has cleared, which means it has cleared every level below.
A position consistent with every conceivable outcome makes no empirical claim. It is placed below the gate and is not assigned a level at all. This is a different location, not a low score — it sits off the ladder rather than beneath it.
Source: Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959.
An evaluative standard invented alongside the thing it evaluates is worth very little. Every component here predates this paper and is in active use elsewhere. The contribution is the uniform application, not the criteria.
This is the answer to the only personal objection available: that the author graded the field he is arguing about. The grading is a rule set applied to a record, not an opinion, and the rule set is published so that disagreement can take the form of a different result rather than a complaint.
Recorded alongside the level, not instead of it. A position carries both.
Progressive — the program predicts and finds novel facts.
Degenerating — the program survives only by adding post-hoc adjustments.
Redefining a term to escape a contradiction counts as a cost, not a repair.
Source: Lakatos, 1970. The direction is carried in the paper; the poster reports levels only, for space.
The positions scored, their categories, and the physicalist-to-nonphysicalist ordering are taken from Kuhn's Landscape of Consciousness (2024). Kuhn supplies the arena; the evaluation is a separate task carried out on that common ground.
CSTP is offered in provisional form. GRADE, CONSORT, and PRISMA all entered their fields as proposals and were refined through use. This is a first application, not a finished instrument.