MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

A SCIENTIFIC ACCOUNT OF MEANING: DEFLATIONARY BUT NOT DISENCHANTING

2009· article· en· W1980625483 on OpenAlexaff
Donald Wiebe

Bibliographic record

VenueZygon® · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicReligion, Ecology, and Ethics
Canadian institutionsTrinity CollegeUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFlourishingMeaning (existential)EpistemologyDisenchantmentNormativeSociologyMythologyPsychologyPhilosophySocial psychologyLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract. In The Really Hard Problem, Owen Flanagan maintains that accounting for meaning requires going beyond the resources of the physical, biological, social, and mind sciences. He notes that the religious myths and fantastical stories that once “funded” flourishing lives and made life meaningful have been epistemically discredited by science but nevertheless insists that meaning does exist and can be fully accounted for only in a form of systematic philosophical theorizing that is continuous with science and does not need to invoke myth. He sees such a mode of thought as a new, empirical‐normative science, which he labels eudaimonistic scientia, that evades the disenchantment produced by natural scientific accounts of meaning. I argue that such an empirical‐normative science does not provide us with a scientific account of meaning but is itself simply another way of making sense of one's life that is open to scientific explanation. Such an explanation will be deflationary in the sense that it presumes no greater scheme of things for meaning beyond the span of human existence (collective and possibly individual) but not disenchanting in that it does not explain away the flourishing lives human persons and communities create for themselves.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.016
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.018
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.016
Threshold uncertainty score0.084

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0160.018
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0040.090
Scholarly communication0.0080.026
Open science0.0020.009
Research integrity0.0060.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.054
GPT teacher head0.341
Teacher spread0.287 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueZygon®Same topicReligion, Ecology, and EthicsFrench-language works237,207