Debating from memory

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

A quodlibetal disputation was live theatre, with questions taken from the floor twice a year, while the Summa was composed at a desk surrounded by books; this conjecture joins the psychology of retrieval under time pressure to citation statistics. Live genres should concentrate citations on the small memorized core of authorities, while composed genres can afford the long tail that only shelved books supply, so the same master on the same topic should look measurably narrower when improvising. Masters made it so because the art of memory stores few authorities deeply, and a public determination could not wait for a book to be fetched. If this holds, citation concentration becomes an instrument for detecting which surviving disputations were actually performed and which are literary fictions wearing disputational clothing.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): matching quodlibetal articles in the Aquinas citation corpus to Summa theologiae articles on the same topics, the share of citations going to the top five authorities is higher in the quodlibets by at least 10 percentage points (equivalently, a significantly higher Gini of the authority distribution). Secondary clause: the quodlibets' authority set is a near-subset of the topic-matched Summa authority set. Statistical test with topic-matched pairs.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Aquinas citation corpus, comparing Quodlibeta contacts against topic-matched Summa theologiae contacts.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated blind by claude-fable-5 in a single Write with no file reads, web access, or database queries; all context was supplied inline in the launching prompt.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The quodlibet's live, spontaneous character vs desk-composed genres is thoroughly documented (Wippel, Glorieux, Schabel), and Carruthers establishes that performance rested on a deeply trained memorized core. The Gini/top-five concentration contrast is un-run, but both the mechanism and direction are anticipated by this literature.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

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