Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some commentators have worried that Descartes's ontological proof is a kind of afterthought, redundancy, or even embarrassment.Descartes has everything needed to establish God as the ground of certainty by Meditation Three, so why bother with yet another proof in Meditation Five?Some have even gone so far as to doubt his sincerity.1 Past literature on this topic is of daunting variety and magnitude, dating back to the seventeenth century. 2 The current discussion has focused on Descartes's premises in relation to the coherence of his concept of God. 3 I wish to take up this issue from a somewhat different tack, showing that 1 See the discussion in Donald Sievert, -Essential Truths and the Ontological Argument: Cartesian Reflections on Recent Discussions,‖ Southwest Philosophy Review VI, no. 1 (1990); S.K. Wertz, -Why is the Ontological Proof in Descartes's Fifth Meditation?‖ Southwest Philosophy Review, VI, no. 2 (1990), 107-09.The standard work questioning Descartes's sincerity is Hiram Caton, The Origin of Subjectivity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,1973), which argues that any discussion of God in Descartes is really part of an elaborate philosophical burlesque that he was forced to go through in order to make his work approvable to the authorities.Ironically, Caton's own book is itself a philosophical burlesque, designed to highlight the philosophical difficulties of post-Cartesian philosophy.See the review by Charles E.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".