← All conjectures · Philosophy, theology & the schools
All roads lead to the Summa
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
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.
In the kill-dataset registry:
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.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- Europe; Medieval Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 1250 CE – 1280 CE Aquinas's own cross-work self-reference structure, c.1252-1274. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Philosophy, theology & the schools (from the generation section)
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Institutions & prosopography; Theology as a science (sacred doctrine) Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Method — Assigned
- Network topology and centrality Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Scholastic citations Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
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.
Sources cited by the triage
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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