Salience Tiers
Salience is the most important score in ACIM Atlas. It is the number that determines whether a motif is recorded in a section at all, how prominently it appears on the site, and how it contributes to every downstream metric and editorial decision. This page explains what salience measures, how it is scored, and what the tier labels mean.
What salience measures
Salience is a measure of unit-local centrality—how central a motif is to what a particular section of the Text is doing. It is not a measure of how important the motif is to the Course as a whole, or how theologically significant the concept is in absolute terms. It answers a specific, local question: in this section, how much of the teaching revolves around this motif?
This means the same motif can score differently in different sections, and should. Forgiveness might score 0.90 (Primary) in a section devoted to the practice of forgiveness and 0.15 (Echo) in a section that mentions it in passing while teaching about something else. Both scores are correct. They describe different sections, not different levels of importance.
The tier bands
Salience scores are continuous values between 0 and 1, but the site groups them into five named tiers for readability and navigation. The tiers are defined by fixed thresholds:
| Tier | Salience range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | 0.80–1.00 | The section is primarily about this motif. It drives the argument, dominates the teaching, or provides the organizing frame. |
| Pillar | 0.60–0.79 | A major motif that drives a significant portion of the section’s argument or practice. Not the sole focus, but a load-bearing element. |
| Supporting | 0.40–0.59 | Clearly developed and meaningful, but not dominant. The motif plays a real role without being what the section is primarily about. |
| Minor | 0.25–0.39 | Present and identifiable, but brief or secondary. The motif is there—it is not an echo—but the section does not dwell on it. |
| Echo | 0.10–0.24 | A faint mention, implication, or brief reference. The motif is detectable but not developed. |
Motifs that score below 0.10 are treated as absent and are not recorded.
The substantive threshold
The boundary at 0.25, between Echo and Minor, is more than a tier break. It is the substantive threshold, a distinction that carries through the entire pipeline.
Occurrences at 0.25 and above are considered substantive. They are eligible for seed, zenith, and milestone flags in Pass 2. They contribute to the substantive frequency metric in Pass 3. They are the occurrences the editorial passes focus on most heavily.
Occurrences below 0.25 are echoes. They are retained in the dataset—they mark that the motif is present, however faintly—but they play a different role. Echoes are not eligible for structural flags, they are hidden by default on the site (though the tier filter can reveal them), and they contribute to the broader frequency metric but not to substantive frequency.
This two-tier distinction exists because echoes and substantive occurrences represent genuinely different things. An echo says “this motif was mentioned.” A substantive occurrence says “this motif was used—it played a role in what the section was teaching.” The pipeline treats them differently because they mean different things.
How salience is scored
Salience is assigned during Pass 1 by a specialist custom GPT evaluating each section against the full motif vocabulary. The score is not derived from word counts or keyword frequency. It is a graded editorial judgment, anchored by four concrete signals that the rubric defines:
Coverage. How broadly the motif appears across the unit—whether it surfaces in a single paragraph or recurs throughout the section.
Emphasis. Whether the section emphasizes the motif through repetition, definition, instruction, or prominent structural placement.
Structural role. Whether the motif functions as a premise or pivot in the section’s logic—a load-bearing element of the argument rather than a passing reference.
Contrast role. Whether the motif appears in an explicit framing contrast that organizes the section’s argument (for example, ego versus Holy Spirit, perception versus knowledge).
These four signals are considered jointly. A motif that scores high on all four—recurring throughout the section, explicitly emphasized, structurally load-bearing, and used in a framing contrast—will score at the Primary level. A motif that surfaces briefly in one paragraph with no structural role will score as Echo or Minor. Most occurrences fall somewhere in between, which is why the tier bands exist.
What salience does not measure
Global importance. A motif’s salience in a section says nothing about whether the motif is important to the Course as a whole. Corpus-wide significance is measured by frequency and intensity, not by any single salience score.
Word count or length. A short section and a long section can both produce Primary-tier salience scores. Salience measures centrality to the section’s teaching, not how many words the section devotes to the motif.
Interpretive depth. Two motifs can both score 0.70 (Pillar) in the same section for very different reasons—one because it is a structural premise, the other because it is heavily repeated. The controlled codes capture how the motif is used. Salience captures how central it is. These are related but distinct questions.
Where salience appears on the site
Salience is visible throughout the interface in several forms: tier badges on every occurrence card, tier-colored pills in the section page’s motif navigation, bar heights in the motif presence chart, step heights in the ascent chart, tier filter chips that let you show or hide occurrences by tier, and exact score bars in Research viewing mode.
In every case, the tier thresholds are the same. A Primary badge, a tall presence bar, and a 0.85 score bar all describe the same thing: a motif that is central to what this section is doing.