The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things. By A.W.Moore. (Cambridge UP, 2012. Pp. xxi + 668. Price £70.00 h/b.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things’ (p. 1).The opening sentence of Adrian Moore's impressive book endorses a conception of metaphysics that is ‘intended to take full advantage’ of the ‘enormous semantic and syntactic latitude’ of the expression ‘make sense of things’ (p. 6). It accommodates those who believe that metaphysics aims at knowledge of propositional truths, as well as those who believe that it aims at non‐propositional knowing how to reckon with things or how to live. (Moore invariably uses ‘truth’ in the sense of ‘propositional truths’, to the exclusion of, say, Hegel's and Heidegger's innovative conceptions of truth.) It embraces conceptual radicals aiming to create novel concepts along with conservatives who regard their proper business as the clarification and mapping of existing concepts. It encompasses believers in transcendence as well as those who confine themselves to the immanent, and those who regard sense‐making as creating sense in things together with those who view it as discovering the sense that things already make. Moore thus takes account of those, such as Frege, who examine linguistic sense as well as of more cosmic sense‐makers. He excludes the sciences, however, because, unlike the sciences, metaphysics is a humanistic discipline, concerned with the ‘place of humanity in the larger scheme of things’ (p. 602) and aiming to make sense of sense‐making itself, in particular their own sense‐making. The generality of metaphysical sense‐making requires self‐conscious reflection, making sense of sense‐making itself, and therefore metaphysicians are also meta‐metaphysicians.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".