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Serial position at the law rock
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Claim (verbatim)
Serial position at the law rock. Joins the cognitive psychology of recall to the stemmatics of oral law. The serial-position curve is among psychology's oldest findings: in reproducing a fixed sequence, people hold the beginning and end best and blur the middle. Iceland's law was exactly such a sequence — recited from memory in fixed thirds over three years at the law rock — so recall error accumulated in a serial-position pattern for generations before the code was finally written down. When the surviving Gragas manuscripts are aligned section by section, the middles of the old recitation units should therefore diverge most between manuscripts, while openings, closings, and the fixed formulae that anchored recall stay the most stable text in the corpus. The conjecture predicts an inverted-U of inter-manuscript drift across each recitation unit, with mid-unit divergence some 30-60% above the edges — a psychology experiment scored on medieval parchment.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Aligning the two principal Gragas manuscripts (Konungsbok and Stadarholsbok) section by section, normalized divergence (word-level edit distance per 1,000 words) is 30-60% higher for material in the middle of a recitation unit than at its opening and closing; divergence versus within-unit position fits an inverted U with R^2 >= 0.2; and fixed opening formulae and procedural incipits are the most stable text in the corpus.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: digitized parallel Gragas texts with the standard sectioning. Flat divergence by position, or maximal drift at the openings, kills it.
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 by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The pieces are established: Gragas's oral-performative formulae are studied, the lawspeaker's thirds-based three-year recitation cycle is documented, and the standard edition already collates Konungsbok against Stadarholsbok. The quantitative serial-position test — divergence by position within recitation units, inverted-U — was not located.
- 'Orality in the Old Icelandic Gragas: Legal Formulae in the Assembly Procedures Section' — Formulae-stability scholarship
- 'From Lawspeaker to Lawbook' (CHS) — The recitation-thirds structure
Predictions
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