Philosophy, Psychology, and History: George Sidney Brett and the Quest for a Social Science at the University of Toronto, 1910‑1940
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between his appointment to the department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1908 until his death in 1944, George Sidney Brett directed the bulk of his writing and teaching to the preservation of the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. In the face of the unpalatable extremes of scientific determinism and the revolutionary celebration of irrationalism, Brett resolutely asserted the unity of knowledge. This, he insisted, rested upon discovering a point of intersection between nature, mind, and society. Brett's writings emphasized the central role of psychology in preserving this unity. In his estimation, psychology possessed close links to the natural sciences of physiology and biology but, more importantly, the study of the human mind was also vitally related to the traditional humanities of philosophy, history, and literature. His belief — that humanistic, philosophical values underlay the structure of knowledge —points to a fundamental divergence between English-Canadian and American universities in the early twentieth century. Brett's standpoint was directed to resisting the fragmentation and specialization which characterized the development of the social sciences in American universities. The fact that Brett and some influential social scientists at the University of Toronto pursued, until the 1940s, a method of organizing their disciplines which preserved the unspecialized, philosophical, and historical emphases associated with the humanistic ideal, indicates the need to revise explanations of the rise of the social sciences in English-Canadian universities.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".