AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Moerbeke's dividend
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Moerbeke's dividend. Joins the chronology of Thomas Aquinas's writing career to the arrival curve of the new Greek-Latin Aristotle: early on, Aquinas met much of Aristotle through florilegia, commentary lemmata, and older versions, quoting at second hand; as William of Moerbeke's literal translations and Italian court access accumulated, direct consultation became cheap. Citation behaviour should show a career-long conversion from mediated to direct contact for Aristotle specifically, while authorities with no new translation supply, such as Augustine, hold flat.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across composition-date windows in the judged citation-contact corpus, primary clause: the direct-quotation share among Aristotle contacts rises with date strongly enough that Spearman's rho between window midpoint and direct share exceeds +0.5, with the late-career direct share at least 15 percentage points above the early-career share. Secondary: the same statistic for Augustine contacts stays within 5 points of flat. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the in-house Aquinas citation corpus (1,424 judged citation contacts with cited authority, direct-vs-mediated quotation, and composition-date windows).
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending
A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).
The qualitative narrative is textbook Aquinas scholarship: early in his career Thomas met Aristotle largely through older versions, florilegia and commentary lemmata, and direct consultation became cheap as William of Moerbeke's literal translations (which Thomas encouraged) and Italian court access accumulated. Torrell's chronology and the Hankey/Taylor account state exactly this shift. What was not located is any measured citation-behaviour trajectory -- direct-quotation share among Aristotle contacts rising with composition date (Spearman rho > +0.5), with a flat Augustine control -- which is the item's real contribution and is a bespoke test on the in-house judged citation corpus.
- Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1: The Person and His Work (rev. ed., CUA Press, 2005) — Standard chronology of Aquinas's works and his access to Aristotle
- Wayne Hankey, 'William of Moerbeke translations and Aquinas' works' — Moerbeke's literal versions and Aquinas's shift to direct consultation
Predictions
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