How to Be Sure: Sensory Exploration and Empirical Certainty*
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The senses can completely dispel rational grounds for a certain kind of doubt, which I shall call empirical doubt, but they cannot dispel another kind, sceptical doubt.In this paper, I elaborate this claim and argue in its support.In the first part of the paper (sections I-III), I describe and discuss a kind of knowledge-gathering activity that I call sensory exploration, and motivate the notion that it eliminates grounds for empirical doubt.Sensory exploration is a distinctive source of knowledge, hitherto unrecognized by philosophers.It relies (of course) on the senses; I'll argue, further, that it does not rely on background non-sensory beliefs.It involves sensory experience (which has been discussed extensively in the philosophical literature), but, as I shall show, it cannot be reduced to sensory experience-both because it involves something more, and because its epistemic authority does not rest on that of experience alone.In the second part of the paper (sections IV-VII), I discuss the epistemic warrant that sensory exploration provides.The position I espouse in this part of the paper somewhat resembles that of G. E. Moore (1959), who thought that clear deliverances of the senses (e.g., "I am standing up, and not either sitting or lying down") are immune from all doubt.My position is not, however, quite as forward as
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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