Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is much that is objectionable and suspect in Shell's magazine advertorial, "Clear Thinking in Troubled Times."This essay will focus in particular on the argument put forward in the three paragraphs (8-10) from lines 37 through 54, and will use Tindale's (1999) assessment of those arguments as a platform for launching my own evaluation and analysis.I want to elaborate two general points about the nature of argument quality and argument evaluation.First, like Tindale, I believe that argument analysis and evaluation must take into account the audience in the argumentation process and must acknowledge that arguments are characteristically (if not always) less than certain demonstrations of the claims they support.The construction of arguments is a bilateral process, whether thought of rhetorically in the roles of a speaker and an audience or dialectically in the roles of two interlocutors.And it is most useful to think of those arguments as stronger or weaker, as more or less convincing, rather than as certain or worthless.But it seems to me that two straightforward implications of these ideas is that the stance from which an audience (or critic) receives an argument can be questioned and evaluated and that any argument evaluation is itself essentially controversial, having the same sorts of properties as the arguments the critic evaluates.Second, we can examine our intuitions about argument quality to uncover the interpretive structuring of argument.Arguments exist as messages.Their content, function, and form are all constructed according to interpretive principles.Not much attention has been given to these principles (though see van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1982a, 1982b, 1984, 1992, or Jacobs, 1995, 1999).But these principles are just as crucial to the organization and quality of arguments as are the principles of inference that logicians have studied or the principles of engagement that rhetoricians and dialecticians have articulated.And these principles can be articulated by "working back" as it were from our evaluative intuitions.Both of these points can be shown by examining the passage from the Shell advertorial.In paragraphs 8, 9, and 10, two claims are implicitly put forward in
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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 | 0.020 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".