Audit the proof-text

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)

This conjecture claims scholastic diligence was tactically allocated: when writing against an opponent, a master re-verified the opponent's proof-texts in full copies, because a misquoted enemy loses the debate, while continuing to take his own side's supporting authorities on anthology trust within the very same work. The join is between adversarial audit theory and the direct-versus-mediated structure of citation: verification effort follows the cost of error, and the cost was asymmetric, since a sloppy quote on your side embarrasses but a sloppy quote of the adversary defeats. So mediation rates should split inside a single polemical work according to whose case a citation belongs to, not according to availability. If this holds, direct citation in polemic marks threat rather than learning, and the celebrated accuracy of the great polemical treatises is revealed as a targeted, not general, virtue.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): in the Aquinas citation corpus, within the polemical works (De unitate intellectus, Contra errores Graecorum, De aeternitate mundi), contacts with authorities central to the opposed position show a significantly lower mediated share than contacts with those same or comparable authorities across the non-polemical works, a within-author contrast tested with authority fixed effects. Statistical test.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Aquinas citation corpus, polemical versus non-polemical works, direct-vs-mediated coding.

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

Scholarship on Aquinas's polemics documents targeted textual diligence against opponents — in De unitate intellectus he contests the Averroists on the letter of Aristotle's text using the new translations — while his anthology-trust for supporting authorities elsewhere is equally documented. The within-work mediated-share contrast is un-run, but the direction (verification effort concentrated where the adversary's proof-texts are at stake) is anticipated.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

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