Bibliographic record
Abstract
Against the current background of renewed publisher interests in encyclopedias, the article examines the modern genealogy of the Encyclopedia project. The article focuses particularly on three moments: Bacon’s ‘Great Instauration’ and attempted fashioning of a ‘New Organon’ (as against the old one of Aristotle), the Encylopedia of 1751 and its revolutionary-era successors, and Comte’s ‘system’ of positive philosophy. D’Alembert and Diderot’s classificatory tree, with its secularized capture of moral and political philosophy, was an attempt to improve on Bacon. Comte’s grand systematizing was an attempt to cap their efforts by being entirely ‘positive’. For this, a science of society and a social standpoint were essential. His effort to fulfill Bacon’s totalizing dream of fully scientific (re-)systematization of knowledge, was a heroic and perhaps absurd failure. But, the article argues, Comte’s critique of Diderot and d’Alembert, with respect to what he took to be the radical incoherence of their classificatory ‘tree’ of knowledge, and his more general critique of both Bacon and 18th-century ‘encyclopedism’ for holding out the possibility of an objective (as opposed to subjective, and human-centered) synthesis of knowledge, touch on ‘metaphysical’ features of the epistemic landscape that, in new forms, are still with us. Comte’s forthright (and sociologically reflexive) articulation of the technocratic and religious dimensions of the Baconian project also illuminates elements of the (French) Enlightenment and derivatives from it that have not received sufficient attention, particularly in relation to one another.
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 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 | 0.000 |
| 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; 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".