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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".