Bibliographic record
Abstract
The latinesque phrase Non plus ultra is well-known to historians of early modern science, because its antithesis-Charles V's imperial motto, Plus ultra-was a familiar catch-cry for the new science. But there is much confusion about the origins of these expressions. One common account supposes some version of the negative tag to have been a standard classical motto, an injunction perhaps, attached to the Pillar of Hercules. This phrase was later inverted to provide the Imperial device (so goes this explanation) and the resulting positive phrase was interpreted as celebrating colonial expansion across the Atlantic. Rosenthal, however, has convincingly undermined this whole story: the ancient motto it posits simply did not exist; the modern was coined before Charles acquired his association with America. The present work refines Rosenthal's argument. I uncover classical sources for the early modern motto, by invoking a more satisfactory version of the inversion thesis. I agree there was no set negative adage, but insist there was a set idea, occuring repeatedly, in texts quite familiar to the Renaissance. This idea is set in contexts that display a popular Urbild of the successful conqueror, and is eventually projected onto Alexander. So it is an ideal source for imperial propoganda.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".