AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
← All conjectures · Philosophy, theology & the schools
Book One swallows the Sentences
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)
Book One swallows the Sentences: the Sentences-commentary genre drifted from pastoral coverage to speculative concentration on a measurable schedule. Disputational prestige, not curricular duty, set the incentives, and prestige lived in Book I's frontier problems — divine knowledge, future contingents, intension of forms — so between 1250 and 1400 commentaries should progressively hypertrophy Book I and abandon Book IV (sacraments), until many stop reaching Book IV at all. The genre's own tables of contents form a clock of scholasticism's speculative turn, decidable from coverage records alone without reading a line of doctrine.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Using per-book coverage recorded for each commentary in the standard repertory, group dated commentaries into half-century cohorts from 1250 to 1400. Primary clause: the proportion of commentaries treating all four books falls monotonically across the three cohorts, with a total drop of at least 30 percentage points; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: among complete commentaries, Book I's share of total length rises across the same cohorts.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: Stegmuller's Repertorium Commentariorum in Sententias Petri Lombardi (published, recording per-book coverage for each commentary), with Doucet's supplement.
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
Rosemann's history of the Sentences tradition documents the fourteenth-century 'movement away from the Sentences' — commentaries growing selective, speculative, and Book-I-heavy, often not reaching Book IV — so the drift is anticipated in print. The cohort-level quantification (monotonic fall in four-book coverage across half-centuries from the repertory data) has not been computed.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
Weigh in
No community feedback yet.
New here? Create an account first
Create an account or sign in and your feedback is tied to you — you can track it, get replies, and claim this conjecture so others know you’re working on it. Prefer not to? Just leave your take below as a guest — only the name you type is shown.
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.