Bernard Lonergan's method and religious studies: functional specialities and the academic study of religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis asks the question, In what way can the generalised empirical method of Bernard Lonergan contribute to an understanding and development of the methodology of religious studies as it is currently practised in Canada? The author first presents a brief history of Bernard Lonergan's understanding of the academic study of religion, including his encounter with the phenomenon upon his return from Rome, his revaluation of 1968, the development of functional specialisation, and his subsequent reflections on the relationship between religious studies and theology. Following a presentation of functional specialisation as an empirical method is an analysis of The Study of Religion in Canada, a series of state-of-the-art reviews published by the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion. The author is able to discern patterns of critique amongst the reviewers and ground their findings in Lonergan's method. Finally, the author presents a series of methodological questions concerning religious studies in Canada and his own tentative answers.
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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 | 0.036 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".