The claim
CLAIM-240 holds that a holistic fidelity judgement is fidelity under the judges’ default task, a weighting of the profile’s components that can be estimated on some renderings and tested on others. Its note of 2026-10-10, on CASE-067, Deborah Smith’s The Vegetarian: “It also shows a limit of the model. Part of the split is access, not weights. Some divergences, such as the confusion of ‘arm’ (pal) and ‘foot’ (bal), are invisible to readers without Korean (‘Most English readers will simply glide over them unaware’). For those components the Anglophone weight is zero by blindness, not by a default task.”
The objection is that a model which weights the components judges perceive does not cover a population that cannot perceive some of them, so where access differs, a fitted difference in weights can be a difference in access. A comparison of two populations’ default tasks then has to separate the components both can perceive from those only one can, and fit weights on the first kind only, as the note says. Without that, CLAIM-240’s estimates are confounded across exactly the populations reception splits are about.
What it does not say
- That holistic judgement is not a default task’s weighting. Within a population, or on components every population perceives, CLAIM-240 stands.
- That access explains the whole split. The Booker judges’ “on their own terms” against comparison in Korea is a difference of task too, as the case records.
- A measure of access. Deciding which components a population can perceive is itself an empirical step the objection requires and does not supply.