AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The purvapaksa is a fossil
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).
Claim (verbatim)
The purvapaksa is a fossil: Sanskrit philosophical debate preserved its enemies more faithfully than its authors. Once a rival school went extinct, its positions fossilized into stock quotable verses that every refuter reproduced nearly verbatim — fairness conventions required quoting the opponent exactly, and after the opponents' own books vanished, the inherited quotation was the only carrier — while each school's own siddhanta prose was freely rewritten in every generation, because living doctrine is maintained by paraphrase. Textual stability should therefore be higher across school lines (shared opponent material) than within them (own-school doctrine).
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across digitized doxographies and polemical works — Sarvadarsanasamgraha, Haribhadra's Saddarsanasamuccaya with Gunaratna's commentary, Jayanta's Nyayamanjari, Santaraksita's Tattvasamgraha with Kamalasila's Panjika — align the shared Carvaka/Lokayata citations. Primary clause: mean normalized verbatim overlap of Carvaka material between texts of different schools exceeds the overlap of parallel doctrinal prose between texts of the same school by at least 20 points of alignment score; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: at least 70 percent of the Carvaka material across these texts reduces to a shared stock of fewer than 30 distinct verses and sutra-fragments.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the GRETIL and SARIT open Sanskrit e-text corpora, which contain all the named texts in machine-readable form; standard sequence alignment closes the question.
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 scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); 188-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w02_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W02 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. DEVIATION DISCLOSURE: after an output-limit resume, one accidental no-op placeholder Write to the session scratchpad preceded this packet Write; nothing was read and no information entered the generation; blindness intact, but the run used two Writes, not one.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
That Carvaka survives only in opponents' near-verbatim quotations is the published foundation of the entire fragment-reconstruction literature (Bhattacharya), anticipating the fossilization mechanism. The comparative alignment — cross-school verbatim overlap of Carvaka material exceeding within-school overlap of siddhanta prose — has not been computed.
Predictions
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