Beyond a Western Self and non-Western Other: Edward Said and his critics on truth and representation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the central arguments Edward Said puts forward in his Orientalism on the epistemological problems surrounding the "West's" knowledge of the "East," particularly the Islamic "East." It then proceeds to examine some of the responses these arguments have elicited from those who object to Orientalism's underlying critique, as exemplified in the writings of Bernard Lewis, and those who accept it with certain qualifications, as exemplified in the writings of Leela Gandhi. Neither of the responses is comprehensive; Lewis's counter-arguments overlook the underlying philosophical issues at stake, whereas Gandhi's response provides a more promising alternative to the future of our knowledge of the "East." I also present some defences of Said's positions that have been criticized by both Lewis and Gandhi.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".