Hard sayings are a small stock

Claim (verbatim)

Hard sayings are a small stock: in the scholastic classroom the objection-side authorities functioned as a memorized bank of classic difficulties — an objection had to be recognizable to master and audience to carry disputational force, so the same hard sayings of Augustine, Aristotle, and Jerome were recycled from disputation to disputation — while build-side authorities were drawn from whatever exemplars the master actually had open on the desk. Testing and building therefore ran on different inventories: the test inventory small, canonical, and repetitive; the build inventory broad and refreshed. This is a claim about concentration, orthogonal to whether the quotations are direct or mediated.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In the 1,424 judged citation contacts, compute the share of contacts falling on the ten most-cited authorities separately for test-assigned and for build-assigned contacts. Primary clause: top-ten concentration among test contacts exceeds top-ten concentration among build contacts by at least 10 percentage points; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: among authorities appearing in both roles, mean contacts per distinct cited work run at least 1.5 times higher in test than in build, i.e. testing re-hits the same loci.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the in-house Aquinas citation corpus (1,424 judged citation contacts with cited-authority identification and build-vs-test reading assignment); two grouped tallies decide it.

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).

That scholastic objections drew on a recognizable, memorized bank of canonical 'hard sayings' -- Aristotle and Augustine as the authorities-as-totems of the disputation, the sic-et-non harvesting of stock contradictions -- is an established characterization of the quaestio, and the direct/mediated-by-role asymmetry is the sibling of W01 'Objections come from florilegia' (also adjacent). Not located: any measurement of the concentration asymmetry the item stakes -- top-ten authority concentration higher among test-assigned than build-assigned contacts by >=10 points, with test re-hitting the same loci at >=1.5x -- which is a bespoke tally on the in-house Aquinas build-vs-test tagging.

• 'Literary Forms of Medieval Philosophy', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on the quaestio, the sic-et-non method, and authority collections) — Staged objections drawn from stock authorities/commonplace collections
• 'The fathers of scholasticism: authorities as totems', in Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism (University of London Press) — Recurring canonical authorities as the fixed apparatus of disputation

Predictions

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