AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Every authority has a seat
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)
This conjecture joins the liturgy-like fixity of the quaestio to network statistics: authorities held stable positional roles, some habitually opening the difficulty in the objections, others sealing the determination, and an authority's seat, not just its frequency, encoded its epistemic rank. Masters composed to audience expectation, since students had learned where a given name lands in the ritual, so the same authority should occupy the same structural seat across works and decades. The mechanism is pedagogical economy: a predictable seating chart let hearers parse an argument's direction from the first name cited. If this holds, positional signature becomes a recoverable hidden variable that frequency-based studies of scholastic authority have missed, and works of doubtful authenticity can be flagged when their authorities sit in the wrong seats.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (verdict follows it): in the Aquinas citation corpus, the distribution across structural positions (objection, sed contra, corpus, replies) for each of the fifteen most-cited authorities deviates from the pooled positional distribution with high significance, and each authority's positional skew is stable between the early Scriptum and the late Summa. Secondary clause: positional signature alone identifies the authority above chance on held-out articles. Statistical test.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
The Aquinas citation corpus positional 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 scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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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
Positional typing of authorities is already part of the standard anatomy of the quaestio — the sed contra is characteristically a brief counter-assertion grounded in Scripture, Augustine, or Aristotle, and objection auctoritates play a documented distinct role. The stability tests and positional classifier are un-run, but the qualitative claim that authorities occupy typed structural seats is established.
Predictions
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