The Market for Philosophers: An Interpretation of Lucian's Satire on Philosophy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Richard Posner's recent book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, is not the first attempt to economically analyze the intellectual marketplace. Eighteen hundred years ago, Lucian applied the same framework to the market for philosophers in the Roman Empire. Though widely seen as a satirist of limited philosophical acumen, Lucian's writings contain enough substance, at least when supplemented with the insights of contemporary economists, to generate an economic theory of philosophy. While much research is still necessary to fully test the theory, it holds promise in explaining key features of philosophic activity. Factors affecting demand and supply are identified in the theory. Also underlined is the risky character of philosophy in forcing consumers to choose among the available schools of thought by using quality indicators, such as the character, education, and commitment of philosophy suppliers. Reflecting a behavioral model, Lucian concludes that consumers take inordinate risks and that the philosophy market fails to produce truth. However, the philosophy market succeeds by generating a variety of world-views reflecting people's distinctive preferences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".