Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper compares and analyzes two of the recent accounts of the ontological status of works of art. Both demand attention not only because they represent some of the most thorough analyses of the problem, but because they have far‐reaching practical consequences for the way in which we (should) interact with works of art, and thus with works of literature. Jerrold Levinson has originally advanced his views in a 1980 essay, “What a Musical Work Is”, revising them in two subsequent versions. Gregory Currie's theory, conceived in part as a response to Levinson's proposals, is outlined in An Ontology of Art (1989), mainly in the third chapter, “Art Works As Action Types”. Although both accounts have their advantages, I argue that conceptual, intuitive, and pragmatic evidence points strongly in favour of accepting only one of them. I begin with a critique of Currie's theses, followed by a review of Levinson's proposals, which leads me to the formulation of a theory of artworks. In the concluding part of my article I apply these findings to the specifically literary‐critical context, arguing for a distinction between literary interpretations and textual readings.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| 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".