The wrong name names the middleman

Status: Already answered

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)

Textual critics reconstruct manuscript families from shared errors; this conjecture applies the same logic to citation, claiming that scholastic misattributions are not noise but the fingerprint of the retrieval channel. A quotation inherits the false ascription its carrying florilegium or glossed book assigned it, so the specific wrong name on a quote identifies which intermediary volume sat on the desk, exactly as a shared corruption proves stemmatic descent. Compilers made it so unwittingly: they copied the ascription with the extract, and masters trusted the compilation's labels. If this holds, we can reconstruct the invisible working bookshelf of any scholastic author purely from his mistakes, a stemmatics of error applied to minds instead of manuscripts.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): misattributed contacts in the Aquinas citation corpus cluster on a small set of false targets whose ascriptions match identifiable intermediaries (Lombard's Sentences, the Glossa ordinaria, major florilegia) in more than 70 percent of decidable cases. Secondary clause: contacts whose misattribution matches an intermediary's ascription are overwhelmingly coded mediated in the corpus.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Aquinas citation corpus misattribution and mediation coding, checked against the ascriptions in Lombard, the Glossa ordinaria, and published florilegium editions.

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

already answered in the literature

Using misattributions to identify the intermediate source is an already-practiced published method: Manipulus florum scholarship traces Thomas of Ireland's false ascriptions to his intermediate sources, and the medieval misattribution literature explicitly treats inherited wrong names as evidence of the carrying compilation. The specific connection (the wrong name fingerprints the intermediary volume) is published practice, not merely anticipated.

Predictions

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