Resolution: Inconclusive
Caveats: Two registered guards fired and the verdict follows them: slot recovery reached only 54.7% against the 60% floor, and the binding sed-contra cell held 46 dated contacts against the required 80. The point estimate is reported plainly anyway: GAP = 0.0 years (both medians 837), which on its face reads as a kill at the 300-year threshold — no softening of that. But the guards exist precisely because this cell is untrustworthy, and here the operator's residual-imperfection notes bite hard: 21 of the 97 sed-contra contacts (and 110 of 790 objection contacts) carry a 'vulgate' authority label that escaped the scripture mapping and so were excluded as undateable — in the one slot whose defining convention is Scripture citation, the corpus dated only 2 Scripture contacts. Restoring the escaped vulgate rows at the registered 100 CE convention would add ~1150-year-old contacts to 31% of the sed-contra cell versus 22% of the objection cell, which could move GAP substantially and in the predicted direction — but that is arithmetic about a fix, not a result, and it stays out of the verdict. The crude authority normalization ('john', 'school', 'marcus', 'peter' as authority tokens) further degrades both dating and the secondary clause, which fails on the compromised population as computed (52.2% vs. the >70% target; 54.8% vs. the <50% target). A better build needs a dedicated structural-slot field instead of rationale-mining, the vulgate subset folded into the scripture mapping, and real authority resolution; until then this conjecture has not been tested.
Public prediction (kept in substance): 'Primary clause: in Aquinas's judged citation contacts, the median composition age of sources cited in sed contra position exceeds the median age of sources cited in objections by at least 300 years. Secondary: Scripture plus pre-600 fathers account for over 70% of sed contra citations but under half of objection citations.' Restated for THIS corpus as it exists: the corpus is 2,245 judged contacts (not the public text's 1,424) across three host works — Scriptum super Sententiis II, De veritate QQ. XIII-XXIX, and ST Ia — all three of which use the objection / sed contra / solution article form, so the structural comparison is well-defined corpus-wide. The structural slot of each contact is not a dedicated field but is registered as recoverable from the judged rationales; slots are assigned from rationale text to {objection, sed contra, corpus/solutio, ad-responses, other/unrecoverable}, and only objection- and sed-contra-slotted contacts enter the primary statistic. COMPOSITION AGE, fixed before computation: age of a cited source at contact = (host work's composition-window midpoint year: 1254 / 1258 / 1267) minus (the cited work's conventional composition year). Cited-work years are assigned by fixed rule from standard reference chronologies: the midpoint of the conventionally accepted composition range; where the work's own date is not conventionally settled, the author's death year is used. Scripture is assigned the single conventional year 100 CE (the young end of canonical composition) — registered as deliberately conservative AGAINST the primary clause, since older Scripture dates would only widen the sed contra age gap. Contacts whose cited authority cannot be identified or dated under this rule are excluded from the statistic. 'Pre-600 fathers' in the secondary clause = Christian patristic authors with death year strictly before 600 CE (Gregory the Great, d. 604, is therefore excluded — registered strictly rather than stretched). The corpus spans only works to c. 1268 rather than the full career to 1273; the article form and its authority conventions are stable across that span, so no truncation carve-out is needed for this conjecture — the prediction applies to the available window as-is.
Resolution criteria: Assign each contact a structural slot from its judged rationale. Compute AGE for every slot-recovered, authority-dateable contact per the registered dating rule. Let M_sc = median age of sed-contra-slot contacts, M_obj = median age of objection-slot contacts, GAP = M_sc - M_obj in years. SUPPORTED: GAP >= 300. KILLED: GAP < 300. The verdict follows this primary clause at the public threshold, unsoftened. DATA GUARDS (any triggers INCONCLUSIVE instead): structural slot recoverable from rationales for less than 60% of the corpus's contacts; or fewer than 80 sed-contra-slot contacts, or fewer than 160 objection-slot contacts, surviving both slot recovery and authority dating (the sed contra carries roughly one citation per article against several per objection block, so the sed contra cell is the binding one); or cited-authority dating impossible for more than 25% of slot-recovered contacts. SECONDARY, reported alongside but never flipping the verdict: PASS if (Scripture + pre-600 fathers, per the registered definitions) account for > 70% of sed-contra-slot contacts AND < 50% of objection-slot contacts; evaluated on the same guarded population.
Known priors disclosure: Shepherd-adjacent. That the sed contra rests on unimpeachable, old authority — Scripture, Augustine, Aristotle — is textbook knowledge of the scholastic article form, known to the shepherd when authoring; the direction is therefore heavily anticipated. What has never been measured is the quantification: the median composition-age gap between sed-contra and objection citations, on any judged corpus. The 300-year threshold was the shepherd's authored magnitude, not drawn from any computed source. Additional adjacency: the shepherd authored the conjecture, oversaw the corpus-building pipeline, and authors this registration; slot-assignment rules, the dating rule (including the conservative Scripture convention and the strict pre-600 cutoff), and all guards are fixed here before any statistic has been computed or seen.
Each contact was slotted from its rationale; composition age = host-window midpoint minus the cited work's conventional year (Scripture fixed at 100 CE, author death-year fallback). GAP = median sed-contra age minus median objection age, threshold 300 years. Registered data guards: >= 60% slot recovery, >= 80 dated sed-contra contacts, >= 160 dated objection contacts, <= 25% undateable among slot-recovered.
Dataset: The same 2,245-contact judged corpus across Scriptum II, De veritate XIII-XXIX, and ST Ia, with structural slots (objection / sed contra / corpus / ad / unrecovered) assigned from judged rationale text as registered.
computed 2026-07-11