Response to G. L. Ebersole’s Criticism of My Critique of the Encyclopedia of Religions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter presents Neil McMullin's response to G.l. Ebersole's letter to the editors criticising his Critique of The Encyclopedia of Religion . On McMullin's reading of his letter, Professor Ebersole addresses four points: 1) Eliade bashing; 2) Eliade's co-religionists; 3) the Divinity School connection of the History of Religions Program at the University of Chicago; and 4) the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. These points are addressed sequentially. The article is not a personal attack on Eliade, and it contains no disparagement of Eliade as an individual. Professor Ebersole's hard distinction between thought and policy is a highly dubious and basically wooden one, and, moreover, one that has dangerous implications. Everyone from Socrates to Dogen to Karl Marx knew that theoria and praxis are intimately conjoined and mutually reinforcing. There are serious issues lurking in the Religious Studies discourse; they need to be addressed. Keywords: G.l. Ebersole; Neil McMullin; religious studies; The Encyclopedia of Religion
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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 | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".