The logical systematist: George Bentham and his<i>Outline of a new system of logic</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
George Bentham was not only a great natural historian, he was, initially, a philosopher and logician of enormous promise. His first published work, the oft-forgotten Outline of a new system of logic (1827) has been heralded by some as the opening salvo in the overthrow of the Aristotelian syllogism's grip on logical inference. The move was a defiant political gesture. The young Bentham composed Outline in close concert with his famous uncle, the great utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, expanding and evolving Jeremy's attempts at a new logical system. Bentham meant Outline to be a contribution to the development of the whole utilitarian project. Yet, after 1827, Bentham was never again to write explicitly on logic and philosophy. His heart seemed to lie in natural history, his first love. However, Bentham never really abandoned the utilitarian picture of logic and philosophy. Recent discoveries in the Bentham papers reveal the strong connection between the Benthamite attack on received philosophical categories and George's role in the development of modern institutional natural history. Bentham the logician can be discovered in Bentham the reformist naturalist. This paper examines Bentham's role in the development of the “new” logic and attempts to explore the notions of a reformed naturalism in his later works. This offers an explanation for Bentham's cautious response to the second great revolution of the nineteenth century: the Darwinian revolution.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".