On sources and narratives in historical social science: a realist critique of positivist and postmodernist epistemologies*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critics of the interdisciplinary enterprise of historical sociology commonly contend that the narrational accounts of past social phenomena provided by historians are inadequate to the task of theory-building and testing. In support of this negative assessment, opponents will adduce informational deficiencies in the available data (the standard positivist appraisal of historical evidence), or cite the interpretive anarchy that seemingly prevails at the narrative phase of emplotment (the skeptical, postmodernist contention that historiographic texts 'construct' rather than veridically represent the events they artfully contrive to signify). Both of these lines of criticism are unbalanced, and therefore seriously misleading as regards the epistemic foundations of historical-sociological inquiry. The 'social authenticity' and 'informational density' of historical evidence does allow for veridical reconstructions of the past, while the reflexive interpretive protocols of source criticism and the sociology of knowledge can be deployed to provide warrant for discriminating arbitrations between competing theories and narratives. The various epistemological deformations in the study of human affairs that have been encouraged by the old idiographic-nomothetic polarity - chronic ahistoricism within the social sciences, the atheoretical predilections of much conventional historiography - are rectifiable through the consolidation of a fully integrated sociological history, a unified and inclusive historical social science.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.040 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.147 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.042 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".