The Third Distinction of Michael Scot's Liber quattuor distinctionum: a window into the social world of astrologers in the early thirteenth century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michael Scot remains an under-studied figure of the early thirteenth century, in particular with regard to his main original work, the Liber introductorius. This work has never been comprehensively edited, although several partial editions do exist. Scot's translations have received scholarly attention and their importance has been recognized, however, his original work has received a fairly negative assessment from scholars. A close look at one section of the Liber introductorius (Liber quattuor distinctionum, third distinction, CLM fols. 118rb-120ra), although it does conform to what scholars have found in other sections of Scot's work, offers another avenue of study; namely, the social historical aspects of astrology and astrologers in the early thirteenth century. Through his practical instructions to fledgling astrologers in matters such as their house, comportment, and dealings with customers, Scot provides us with a window into the social world of the astrologers of his time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".