L'Astronomie Dans Le Dictionnaire des Arts et des Sciences (1694) De Thomas Corneille
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1690, the Académie française, which had worked for more than half a century on producing a dictionary that would reflect correct speech, was caught off-guard when one of their own, Academy member Antoine Furetière, published his own Dictionnaire universel first. Furthermore, the Academy’s dictionary, which appeared only in 1694, excluded terms of “arts and sciences”, but Furetière claimed to have included all French words, including those of science and technology. Fearing for its own dictionary, the Académie française commissioned Thomas Corneille, who had succeeded his older brother Pierre in the Academy, to produce a compendium of science and technology to add to the dictionary in progress. Corneille’s Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences would form the last two volumes of the four-volume Dictionnaire de l’Académie française presented to the king. The fact that the two dictionaries were published so close together explains why they are always compared. Overall, to date, the judgements of Corneille’s dictionary have been very critical, but were they always fair? Consider particularly the critique by Reynier in the nineteenth century and that by Ross in the twentieth. Using five astronomy terms in the family of physical objects–comète, planète, Soleil, étoile and système–we will take a new look at Thomas Corneille’s work. Without dismissing the inevitable comparison with Furetière, or being excessively indulgent or severe, we want to judge Thomas Corneille’s work in light of the question that seems most important to us: to what extent does Corneille’s dictionary reflect the advancements in astronomy resulting from Galileo’s first discoveries and the issues surrounding this discipline in the seventeenth century?
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
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".