The Relation between Literary Form and Philosophical Argument in Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Philosophers from Plato onwards have always attached importance to the possibilities that differing literary forms give for the expression of philosophical ideas. No one can read Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein, for example, without paying attention to how the literary form helps to constitute the philosophical content. Recently there has been renewed interest in \nthe debates that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on \nthe significance and appropriateness of literary forms for philosophical argument. \nIn the last few years alone there have been major studies of the styles and genres of writing used by Bayle, Locke, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, and Hume.’ \nThis paper is concerned with questions about the relation between the philosophical \narguments and the literary form that arise from attempts to read David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.2 This debate has been exten~ivea,n~d I cannot attempt here to discuss all the questions it has raised. I hope only to propose certain issues that seem to me important and so to contribute to the continuation of the debate.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.076 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".