Hume and Locke on Scientific Methodology: The Newtonian Legacy
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hume follows Newton in replacing the mechanical philosophy's demonstrative ideal of science by the Principia's ideal of inductive proof (especially as formulated in Newton's Rule III); in this respect, Hume differs sharply from Locke. Hume is also guided by Newton's own criticisms of the mechanical philosophers' hypotheses. The first stage of Hume's skeptical argument concerning causation targets central tenets of the mechanical philosophers' (in particular, Locke's) conception of causation, all of which rely on the a priori postulation of a hidden configuration of primary qualities. The skeptical argument concerning the causal inductive inference (with its implicit principle that nature is, in Newton's words, "ever consonant with itself") then raises doubts about what Hume himself regards as our very best inductive method. Hume's own "Rules" (T 1.3.15) further substantiate his reliance on Newton. Finally, Locke's distinction between "Knowledge" and "Probability" ("Opinion") does not leave room for Hume's Newtonian notion of inductive proof.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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 it