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The Bootstrapping Problem

2012· article· en· W1644355636 on OpenAlexaff
Jonathan Weisberg

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophy Compass · 2012
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBootstrapping (finance)Allowance (engineering)Computer scienceFace (sociological concept)Focus (optics)Reliability (semiconductor)PsychologyEconometricsMathematicsSociologyEconomicsOperations management

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Bootstrapping is a suspicious form of reasoning that verifies a source's reliability by checking the source against itself. Theories that endorse such reasoning face the bootstrapping problem. This article considers which theories face the problem and surveys potential solutions. The initial focus is on theories like reliabilism and dogmatism, which allow one to gain knowledge from a source without knowing that it is reliable. But the discussion quickly turns to a more general version of the problem that does not depend on this allowance. Five potential solutions to the general problem are evaluated, and some implications for the literature on peer disagreement are considered.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.048
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.288
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.048
Threshold uncertainty score0.252

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0480.288
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.002
Bibliometrics0.0040.005
Science and technology studies0.0070.023
Scholarly communication0.0070.023
Open science0.0050.010
Research integrity0.0090.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0160.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.125
GPT teacher head0.280
Teacher spread0.155 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations87
Published2012
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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