All roads lead to the Summa

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 self-reference is directional in a way that maps intended curriculum rather than composition history: the occasional works, disputed questions and opuscula, point the reader elsewhere toward the systematic works, while the systematic works rarely point back down, so the corpus forms a rooted tree with the teaching summa at the root. The join is between citation-network topology and authorial self-conception: a master's cross-references encode how he wanted his output traversed, a syllabus drawn in his own hand inside the texts. The mechanism is audience: occasional works answer a moment and defer full treatment, while the summa is written as the destination that need defer to nothing. If this holds, cross-work self-citation gives an internal, author's-eye ordering of any scholastic corpus, checkable against external chronology and revealing where the two orderings deliberately diverge.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): in the Aquinas citation corpus, cross-work self-reference contacts point from occasional and polemical works toward the systematic works in at least 75 percent of cases, a rate significantly above what composition order alone would produce under a null in which references simply point backward in time.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Aquinas citation corpus self-reference contacts with work chronology.

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

Aquinas's cross-work self-references are catalogued and routinely exploited for chronology (Torrell), and the qualitative pattern — occasional works deferring fuller treatment to the systematic works — is a standard observation in that dating literature. The 75% directionality test against a backward-in-time null is un-run, but both method and direction are anticipated.

J.-P. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work (chronology from internal cross-references)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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