The order betrays the excerptor

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)

When a scholastic author cites several passages from one source work inside a single question, direct reading tends to harvest them in the source's own order, because a reader's eye moves forward through a codex, while florilegial retrieval yields the anthology's re-sorted order. This conjecture joins sequence-alignment thinking from stemmatics to citation practice: order concordance with the source is a channel detector, classifying direct versus mediated access with no external evidence at all. Compilers made the signal by design, since florilegia re-sort extracts by topic and so scramble the source sequence. If this holds, mediation becomes detectable at scale in any corpus, including traditions whose florilegia are lost, and the human-judged labels of existing citation corpora can be audited mechanically.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): in the Aquinas citation corpus, for question-level runs of three or more citations from a single source work, the Kendall tau concordance with the source's internal order is significantly higher for runs judged direct than for runs judged mediated. Secondary clause: an ordering-only classifier recovers the direct-vs-mediated label at 70 percent accuracy or better on held-out runs. Statistical test.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Aquinas citation corpus multi-citation runs, scored against the internal ordering of the cited source works.

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

Source criticism already establishes anthology dependence from shared selection and sequence of excerpts, and stemmatics' shared-derangement logic is the standard method the item itself invokes; florilegia scholarship documents that anthologies re-sort extracts topically and that passages circulate unchecked against originals. The Kendall-tau classifier on the Aquinas corpus is un-run, but order-as-dependence-evidence is standard Quellenforschung.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

No community feedback yet.

Add your take

Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.