The Politics of Wishful Thinking? Disentangling the Role of the Scholar-Scientist from that of the Public Intellectual in the Modern Academic Study of Religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although religion may well have relevance for various social, political, economic, cultural, and other related issues in society, I will argue here that this does not oblige the academic student of religion to become engaged with those matters. Indeed, to do so - not as a citizen but as a member of the academic guild which has responsibility to the field/discipline of Religious Studies and the modern research university at large - is to fuse and therefore confuse advocacy and scholarship. The task of the student of religion, qua scientist, is to seek to understand and to explain religion and religions, not to create the good society. I attempt to show here that with the infiltration of the ideal of the student of religion as public intellectual - whether as religious critic, critic of religion, or member of a new secular clerisy - the scientific agenda of seeking disinterested knowledge about religion and religions has been, and continues to be, eroded if not displaced.
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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 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.089 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".