The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin - George Crowder and Henry Hardy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Long ago, when the pre‐Socratic atomist philosophers Leucippus and Democritus decided that reality was made up of atoms, they began a small philosophical industry. Much hay was made by the thinkers of the day, who would pass their time arguing over whether those atoms were made up of air, fire, earth or water. Today, their heirs in political philosophy have shifted the debate somewhat: the issue is no longer atoms but atomic moral concepts. For having analysed or chopped up our moral world into separate values, the question now is whether these things may somehow be put together again. Can they be made into a one, or must they remain many? To Rawlsians and other monists, unity is indeed a possibility. Thin ‘primary goods’ can be interlocked to make for a systematic theory of justice, a rulebook intended for application by a neutral referee (usually a country's supreme court). Politics, as a result, appears remarkably like a game or competitive sport. To Isaiah Berlin and his pluralist followers, by contrast, the fact that values are often incommensurable with one another means that no such rulebook is ever possible. So when people come into conflict, instead of pleading their cases before some referee they ought to negotiate with each other in good faith. Politics, in this view, is anything but a game; it is the site of inescapable tragedy, of compromise and dirty hands.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.006 |
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".